RFC: dealing with dead, anonymous feature branches

[Gilles Moris]

On Saturday 08 May 2010 10:32:04 am Martin Geisler wrote:
> > I am more concerned the close-branch behavior itself. May be I am
> > stupid, but I have hard time to understand the logic behind the
> > current implementation. [...]
>
> No, I agree with you and your requirements. They sound like the way I
> have also imagined closed heads to work.
>
> So I'm suggesting something stronger than you: dead heads behave like
> "Gilles-style" closed heads and they are not pushed or pulled.

I agree that push/pull can be considered orthogonal, and actually your idea is 
very neat. But my fears are:
- from user's perspective, comments or bug report like this:
"Hey guys, I've found a bug in Mercurial. Pull does not work. I try to pull a 
nice feature that Bob attempted at one point of time, I can see it's there 
but pull does not work on his repo."
May be it's just a matter of better advertising closed heads and of education. 
But we should be prepared to that.
- internally, added complexity on the push/pull changeset discovery algorithm. 
But may be it's peanuts compared to the logic already in place. I don't know 
enough to evaluate.

Anyway, it's worth digging as dangling heads has been a longstanding concern.

Regards.
Gilles.