Complexity of operations in Mercurial

[Angel Ezquerra]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Martin Geisler <mg at lazybytes.net> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> This question was asked recently on Stack Overflow:
>
>  http://stackoverflow.com/q/9169598/110204
>
> It's about how closed branches affect the performance. Do we have a wiki
> page (or some other reference) that details the complexity of various
> operations like 'hg commit', 'hg tag', 'hg pull'?
>
> --
> Martin Geisler
>

Martin,

going through your answer, I wonder if using the close-before-merge
strategy will result in completely removing any performance penalty
that may occur when you have a huge number of branches. If that is the
case I think it would be great to highlight that fact (on the wiki,
for example) as it would dispel the recurring myth that mercurial's
performance does not scale well with the number of branches (something
I've seen git advocates say in the past).

Also, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to add a --close-branch
option to the merge command, which automatically did the
"close-before-merge" for you. This would be a very good way to ensure
that most people would use the right strategy.

I must say that I have wondered about this up until now and in fact I
didn't even know that it was OK to close and then merge (the fact that
the option is called --close-branch rather than --close-head made
things even more confusing too).

Cheers,

Angel