rename default branch

[Greg Ward]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 9:11 AM, James P. Howard, II <jh at jameshoward.us> wrote:
> Like a good little grad student, I am writing my proposal and
> dissertation in LaTeX and have the good sense to deploy Mercurial on
> this at the start.
>
> Given that the dissertation is a superset of the proposal[1], it seems
> to me that my plan should be to operate in the default branch until
> such time as the proposal and dissertation diverge (likely before the
> proposal is finalized).  So it makes sense to me that I should rename
> the default branch to "proposal" and then branch "dissertation" from
> it at some future date.
>
> With this in mind, how do I rename default to something meaningful?

If you haven't started work yet, it's easy:

  hg init thesis
  cd thesis
  hg branch proposal
  [work work work]
  hg branch dissertation
  [some more work]
  [submit]
  [graduate]

If you *have* already committed on default, then your only hope is an
hg->hg conversion using a branchmap to rename your branch.  The
resulting repo will NOT be compatible with your old one, i.e. the
changeset IDs will be different.

Greg