Strategies for push/merge problem?

[Risto Kankkunen]

Douglas Philips <dgou <at> mac.com> writes:
> Sounds like you want to have intermediate commits collapsed before  
> they are pushed. That is certainly one policy. Another policy is that  
> a set of changesets which are pushed together should not fail the  
> testsuite. There is work going on with the group-ing extension which  
> formalizes this since some find it is useful to have the extra meta- 
> data made explicit.

Regulating what can be pushed or committed goes against many of the benefits of
DVCS and can make it harder to review the history later. The grouping extension
could indeed be used to collect incremental changes into coherent chunks.

However, I'm wondering couldn't you use branches in Mercurial for the same
thing: develop, commit and push your changes to a separate branch until they are
stable enough and pass the test suite before merging into the mainline. Anyone
care to comment does this work in practice?