Why you don't want to allow disabling "branches are global and permanent, did you want a bookmark"?

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 08/08/12 13:10, v wrote:
> I humbly suggest that this is objectively bad UI design, not just a matter of
> personal preference. Asking "do you want to do something else instead?"
> every time a branch is created implies a deprecated feature or one which
> should rarely be used, not just warning the user about a common
> misunderstanding.

The root cause of the "problem" is that git started using the name 
"branch" for something that was temporary. Many new Mercurial users thus 
have wrong expectations when they start using Mercurial. This message is 
an attempt at mitigating one of the first and major issue these users 
have with Mercurial.

Nobody denied that the message could be improved. This is the -devel 
list - please try to contribute a convincing a patch.

We want to keep a message that will educate new users that come with 
wrong expectations ... but it would be nice if the message acknowledged 
the sane use cases for 'branch' and didn't hint so strongly that the 
user was wrong.

> And as vitalif pointed out, the ubiquitous UI convention is that warnings
> can be disabled after they're shown for the first time. Perhaps the wording
> should be softer, and only shown when the first named branch is created.

If that is a convention then it is not a convention that applies here. 
Mercurial intentionally try to behave exactly the same way everywhere 
and has as few configuration options as possible.

A "say-this-only-once---ever" extension should however not be hard to write.

/Mads