Re: help with mercurial

[Benjamin Lindner]

> In the past we created separate Mercurial archives for the release
> branches.  That had some advantages, like a very low probability of
> accidental merges or commits on the wrong branch, no cluttering of the
> main archive with a branch that few people would be working with.  But
> it also had the big disadvantage of being mostly hidden from view.  So
> I'm thinking of making the release-3-4-x branch a named branch on the
> savannah archive.  I think I know how to do that.  But I'd also like
> to put the older release-3-0-x and release-3-2-x branches there too,
> both as named branches.  Does anyone here know what is needed to do
> that?

I found the following article a nice explanation of the different
branching techniques
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

Once a branch is named you can easily combine or separate it from the
default branch by simply pulling respecively cloning (provided you did
not merge from the default branch into the named branch). So having
them combined in one repository has IMO the only advantage of
immediate visibility.
It's not really easier to backport patches to the stable branch within
the same repositroy than having two separate repositories, and AFAIK
you can't merge a single changeset alone, so you have to import
anyway.

Naming a branch after it has been created is - I believe - not
possible, because a changeset has the associated branch included, and
I don't know if this can be changed afterwards. I once tried to do
what you proposed, but didn't succeed.

benjamin