Strategies for push/merge problem?

[Risto Kankkunen]

> > 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.
> 
> Isn't it simpler to use a separate repo until the tests pass? Which is what
> people are already doing when they don't push until the feature is done.

The situation I'm referring to is when people want to record for posterity the
steps they took to implement a feature instead of the zeus athena alternative.
Consider Benjamin Smedberg's partially automatic refactoring case for example.

It is much harder to find a separate repo afterwards when I'm trying to figure
out why a certain feature was introduced into the mainline in its current form.