Suffering from CVS mindset

[Greg Ward]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Yawar Amin <yawar.amin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure, except that I don't get how that's like Subversion ...

One of the Big Ideas in Subversion is that branches are nothing
special: they're just cheap copies of <dir1> to <dir2>.  The whole
/{trunk,tags,branches} layout is just the conventional way to
implement that.

It turns out, of course, that that is a *bad* idea.  Branches *are*
special; they're not the same as directories.  And tags are also
special and different.  And that's what's wrong with Subversion
(IMHO).

> but in any
> case, if I want to use named branches like that ... well ... it's really
> up to me :-)

The OP is clearly trying to wrap his head around the core concepts of
Mercurial.  Throwing named branches into the mix is not going to help
him.  And suggesting a weird and unconventional use of named branches
is even less helpful.  Threads like this are not about thinking up
clever and original ways to use Mercurial, but about trying to explain
the normal and conventional ways better.

Greg