Release engineering on named branches?

[Michael Sperber]

I'm trying to figure out how to best use Mercurial in the following
scenario:

I'm managing an open-source package (Scheme 48), where the release
contains all kinds of generated files which aren't normally checked in.
However, I'd like to preserve them in the revision history to avoid
bootstrapping problems later, in case tools needed to build them become
unavailable.  (Also, some other minor changes may need to be made which
aren't from the development branch.)

I used to do this in Subversion by creating a (short) branch at whose
end I'd check in the generated files.  Naively, I was thinking I could
just use named branches in Mercurial.  This doesn't seem to be a good
idea, as I can seem to be able to push branches as is (i.e. recreate the
branch, including its parent on the remote repo---when I tried to push
the branch, the parent would be lost), and I Mercurial expects me to
merge them at some point (right?), which I have no intention of doing.

I'd like to avoid a proliferation of repositories for this: Can anybody
recommend how to best do all this?

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla