terminology confusion: bookmark vs named head

[Stephen Lee]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 8:28 PM, Martin Geisler <martin at geisler.net> wrote:
> anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>  On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 4:54 AM, Stephen Lee <sphen.lee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The only command that causes bookmark confusion for me is a bare (no
>>> arguments) "hg up" which moves the active bookmark to the head you
>>> are updating to. This has been a point of discussion in the past, but
>>> no conclusions were made.
>>
>> Even "hg push/pull" still doesn't look great for my original purpose
>> for bookmarks and "hg up" as you describe is really awful, but I guess
>> it at least doesn't move bookmarks between named branches?
>
> Only because 'hg up' itself doesn't move between named branches. It's
> important to understand that the behavior of bookmarks is bolted onto
> the existing behavior of Mercurial -- for better and for worse.
>
> I've had great trouble with the distinction between 'hg up' and 'hg up
> default' introduced by bookmarks. I'm only very rarely using 'hg up'
> without giving it an explicit revision. My thinking is something like
> this: why would I want to update without telling update where to go to?
> After a pull, I look at the graph and decide where to go. This meant
> that I again and again "lost" (deactivated and left behind) my active
> bookmark. That is probably a problem with my workflow and maybe
> bookmarks work fine if you've been used to them from the beginning.
>

It's not a problem with your workflow Martin - we have been having
this problem too. :(

In an all bookmarks workflow, "hg up" aborts with "all heads are
bookmarked" so you always have to name the head, and the move
behaviour never triggers.
This means a linear merge ('fast-forward merge' from Git) needs to be
done as two steps "hg up x; hg book y" which is less than ideal.

As you said: bookmark behaviour is bolted onto normal Mercurial
behaviour. Mercurial does not distinguish the "checkout" usage of "hg
up" from it's linear merge usage and hence bookmarks cannot either.

Steve