Paralell branches/clones in Mercurial?

Question

This question is not only technical. I want to get into the concept itself, too.

There is a foreign project on BitBucket (e.g. ObjectListView). And I need to work on two problems at the same time. In git I would just create to branches in my local repository after clonening.

But how would I does this with Mercurial?

When I create branches there I am not able to push my local commits back to the remote repository because of the missing '--allow-new-branch' option. So it doesn't want me to branch.

In my current understanding I would just create a clone for each new feauter (branch). So this means I have to create two forks on BitBucket for one project when I want to work on two different problems.

How would you solve this?

Answer 1

There is some missing information here, so I'm not sure I know what your problem is. I'll try to take some educated guesses and cover a number of possibilities. Feel free to ask back if I failed to address your problem adequately.

First, you can definitely just create new branches if you wish to do that. You'll need to use hg push -f or hg push --new-branch (if you used a named rather than an anonymous branch) to make the remote server accept them (that's to prevent you from pushing new branches by accident). You will, of course, need write access to the repository (or fork the repository and work on that fork).

Second, if you just want to push the current revision/branch (and any associated revisions of a feature branch) and not sync the entire repository, then hg push -r . will do that (here, . denotes the current revision, you can also specify others). If you use that frequently, you may want to create an alias, e.g. submit = push -r ..

Third, if you actually need separate workspaces, it's probably more convenient to use hg share instead of cloning the repository. (Note that you'll first have to enable the share "extension" for that; the word "extension" is in quotes because it's actually a part of core Mercurial and not really an extension in the traditional sense.) hg share creates a separate directory that is still linked to the same repository, but has a separate checkout with separate files.

It is also important to understand that branches in Git and Mercurial are completely different things. Branches in Git, aside from naming specific commits, exist to keep revisions alive (so they don't get garbage-collected). In Mercurial, nothing ever gets garbage-collected, so you don't need Git-like branches for that purpose; instead, Mercurial has anonymous branches (which are sort of like detached HEADs in Git -- sort of) and named branches (which are used to label sets of revisions with a permanent name). Bookmarks can be used to put temporary labels on either type of branch (or specific revisions). Bookmarks + anonymous branches can be made to feel fairly Git-like if you desire that.

So, if you want a Git-like approach, you'd just create anonymous branches (and optionally put a bookmark on them for ease of reference, though having them as branch heads in two directories created with hg share can be the better choice if you wish to work on both concurrently without having to switch. You'd then use hg push -r . to push that specific branch to the remote repository (you may also need -f if you're creating a new head).

However, if it is not your repository, you may want to check with the owner what structure they prefer; for example, plenty of Mercurial users prefer named branches in order to be able to tell later which revisions belong together (sort of like a tag that spans multiple revisions).