coming from git, understanding mercurial branching

I've got a pretty good grasp on git's rather straightforward branching, but am trying to wrap my head around Mercurial's branching. There seem to be several flavors, some default to push-public, while others are private; some are tracked in history, while others seem more ephemeral; often the docs suggest cloning instead of branching; detached heads seem more normal in the Mercurial world.

Do any git users here have good "understanding Mercurial branches for the git user" resources they've found helpful when working with Mercurial? Preferably a "for dummies" resource with illustrations & comparison charts so I can see the big picture.

Thanks

-tkc

PS: I've read a couple Mercurial resources including
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/GitConcepts
but it didn't really dig into comparing the mental models used in
branching.  

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Tim Chase <git@tim.thechases.com> wrote:

First: recognize Mercurial's branches are entirely different beasts
from Git's. They just happen to be given a same sequence of
characters, b-r-a-n-c-h. The similarities end there!

Are you referring to this?

  $ hg clone https://... master
  $ cd master
  # hack...

  $ cd ..
  $ hg clone https://... fix1
  $ cd fix1
  # hack...

  $ cd../master
  $ hg pull ../fix1
  $ hg merge ...

In git, you would have your master branch, checkout -b fix1, then merge them back to master when you're done. The above describes how one would do this in mercurial.

On 2013-09-06 12:39, Tay Ray Chuan wrote:

Yeah, I'm trying to create a mental map between what Git means by branching, and what Mercurial means by branching. As you say, they seem to be entirely different beasts.

Usually I see this written as

  $ cd ..
  $ hg clone master fix1

but otherwise, yes.

Mercurial has this cloning-branch thing, a "branch" command, and something called "bookmarks" which all seem to have different behaviors (and corresponding reasons to choose them) and yet all be loosely referred to as "branching". Cloning litters the drive with duplicate checkouts (even if they use hard-linking for the repo behind the scenes, there's still a lot of time spent writing. The git equiv of this hg suite would be almost identical, cloning a local checkout); the 2nd and 3rd are more branch-related and what I'm trying to grok.

-tkc

On Thu, 5 Sep 2013 21:27:14 -0500 Tim Chase <git@tim.thechases.com> wrote:

[...]

I found this guide [1] very useful back in the time I tried to grok Mercurial.

1. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

From: "Konstantin Khomoutov" <flatworm@users.sourceforge.net>
To: "Tim Chase" <git@tim.thechases.com>

Tim, Another recent blog is http://felipec.org/2013/08/27/analysis-of-hg-and-git-branches/ by Felipe Contreras who wrote Git's official GitMercurial bridge; git-remote-hg

Philip 

On 2013-09-06 17:51, Konstantin Khomoutov wrote:

Indeed, after reading it, that's the most sense I've been able to make of Mercurial's strange branching. I guess it boils down to the following rough heuristic:

- if you want to dink around locally, but don't want to publish your
  branches (yet), default to bookmarks using "hg bookmark"

- once you want a branch to be public, consider making a "real"
  branch using "hg branch"

- if you want complete isolation in case you screw up something like
  merging, use a clone

I still prefer Git's way, but at least I'm not left scratching my head when I have to play with Mercurial branches.

Thanks, all.

-tkc

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Tim Chase <git@tim.thechases.com> wrote:

I've written various blog posts about the subject:

http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/mercurial-vs-git-its-all-in-the-branches/ http://felipec.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/no-mercurial-branches-are-still-not-better-than-git-ones-response-to-jhws-more-on-mercurial-vs-git-with-graphs/ http://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/analysis-of-hg-and-git-branches/

Kind of, but then they added support to push bookmarks, so now you can fetch and push them, so not exactly local.

In addition, they are starting to think on adding remote namespaces, like in Git, except that jon/devel becomes jon@devel.

Not necessarily. You can merge or rebase, so "the public" doesn't see the bookmark.

I guess so. There's also the option of using the 'mq' extension, which I guess it's similar to quilt.