Branching vs Cloning

[Michael Fromin]

Excuse the "newbie" nature of this question but I am struggling to see when one should Branch and when one should Clone. 

I am a sole developer working on a project.  I use Mercurial for my repo so I have a nice history of the work I do.  For linear work, the process of making changes and then committing the changes is easy and straight forward.  

Where I am struggling is how to properly do two things:

1 - At a certain point in time the code is "ready for deployment".  At that point I would like a nice way to mark that changeset so (if needed) I can easily roll back to that if needed.   

2 - Once I have the code in production I will likely need to move forward with work on "the next version" but I may also have to make small updates to the current production code if issues are found.  

For item #1...

I believe that I would use the TAG capability of the system to mark specific changesets.  As I already have 11 changesets in the repository I cannot seem to find a way to tag any existing changesets.  Am I missing something or is this not doable in Mercurial?  Is there another way to do this?  For example, should I branch off the main path for each "version" that I want to identify?  


For item #2...

If I have multiple "work streams" that I need to do in parallel do I make multiple branches or multiple clones?  It appears that (in theory) I could do either as both seem to provide me a way to isolate a set of code changes that I can later merge back into a single parent changeset.  Is there a particular "best practice" for how this should be done?  Are branches better for this?  Are clones better for this?  

If I do branch then would I perform "fixes/patches" to the branch and then merge them in later?  If I don't make a branch do I just clone the repo to the appropriate changeset, make the change, and then merge back in somewhere?  If so where?



I appreciate any input this list can provide.  I am new to version control and Mercurial and want to make sure I have my processes in order before I get too far into this development process.

--Michael


      
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