Fixing default behavior of bookmarks.

[Pulkit Goyal]

Hi everyone,

>From some months we (mostly Augie and me) are discussing that we
should fix the default behavior of bookmarks. The current behavior is
buggy in different ways and I know atleast three companies (Facebook,
Janestreet and one more) which uses bookmark but has modified the
default behavior.

This is not about whether bookmarks are a good way to name things. I
think refs are one of the good ways to name commit and current
bookmark behavior is not best experience in that space.

There has been various discussions on this and efforts too. I am able
to find two plan pages:

* https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/BookmarkUpdatePlan (this does not
seem to be done)
* https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/BookmarksPlan

Sandu recently proposed a change in
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2019-October/135395.html

There has been efforts from Fb in past to improve things by moving
remotenames to core and trying to change related things. Sandu has
contributed a bookflow extension which tries to solve some of the
issues and has some patches in review too.

My bookmarks usage is pretty limited, but I do extensively use
git-like refs at work. It will be nice to start discussing the
problems which users face right now and solutions for that. So, if you
have suggestions or issues around current bookmark behavior, it's a
nice time to speak up.

I hope in the end we can make some BC changes and make the default
behavior saner for everyone.

Thanks!
Pulkit