Questions about branching in Mercurial

[Sebastien Lucas]

On 5/6/07, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 06, 2007 at 11:30:04AM +1000, Tim Allen wrote:
> > > There are currently some discussions about strange effects when merging
> > > two named branches on the mailinglist, so in your case I would consider to
> > > subscribe to the list.
> >
> > I've been checking the mail archive at http://marc.info/ since it was
> > recommended on the Mercurial wiki, and sadly it doesn't have that thread
> > yet. The Mailman archives at selenic.com do record it, and gmane does as
> > well, so I guess I'll be using gmane in future.
> >
> > That thread pretty much answers my questions (the consensus seems to be
> > that named branches aren't useful yet) so I guess I'm done.
>
> They've still got a couple rough edges that should be polished up in
> the next couple months, but I think they're perfectly useful today
> provided you understand how they work.

I don't know if the goal is that named branches and "cloned" branches
have the same functionnalities. By now it's not the case.

If I have a repo with one head (master) and I clone it to make a new
branch (dev-branch) then I'll a have two repo with one head in each
repo. assuming I do not touch master and I add some changeset in
dev-branch I can push my change from dev-branch to master and merge
them.

Now if I do the same with named branches I'll have to commit a dummy
changeset on master so that my repository has two heads and I can
merge (See this thread for more detail :
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/1352)

> I haven't been recommending them to people simply because most people
> who are new to distributed systems seem to get themselves confused
> enough without them. One working directory = one repository = one
> branch is the simplest place to start.

I agree with that. I just want to understand why named branch use does
not change hg heads output, in my opinion it should.

Thanks for your time.

Sebastien