Using bookmarks in Mercurial itself

[Martin Geisler]

Patrick Mézard <pmezard at gmail.com> writes:

> Le 17/06/11 13:08, Martin Geisler a écrit :
>>
>> It's of course just a gut feeling, but I feel that a DVCS should
>> allow us to commit and experiment more freely than we do today.
>
> Mercurial is a DVCS, not your everyday project library or web
> framework. If broken stuff is pushed,

I did not talk about pushing broken stuff, I talked about pushing stuff
where the test suite still passes.

> I lose data because I run tip.

If bookmarked branches are even slightly useful, then it should be
possible to have them in a repository while also have a stable default
branch tip. But you're right that

  hg update stable
  hg update default

might take you back to a "random" head on the default branch, including
a head on an experimental branch. That does sound dangerous -- would a
"crew" bookmark on the right default head solve this?

> Being hesitant is not related to us using a DVCS but to us writing a
> DVCS.

I don't think so -- people working on tools like Emacs, GCC have the
same problem if they use the tool they are hacking on to hack on the
tool itself.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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