CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mercurialbitbucket
Lovethenakedgun
Lovethenakedgun

Reputation: 845

Issues with multiple unclosed heads in Mercurial?

I've just recently started working at a small company, that develops a web app, and has primarily used one developer over the years. For their version control, they use Mercurial & bitbucket. I've just recently been looking through their revision history, and have noticed something to the effect of >100 unclosed heads in the repo. I believe this is due to the previous developer creating new named branches for each version of the app, but never closing the head of the previous version.

I've seen several articles about how to close heads and manage branches in Mercurial, but after seeing this it prompted me to ask, what are the direct issues relating to having multiple unclosed heads? This developer clearly has used this method of branching for this project for a few years, but is it considered bad practice?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 52

Answers (1)

Boris Feld
Boris Feld

Reputation: 845

It's not a "bad practice" but Mercurial have several commands and algorithm that scale relative to the number heads (O(len(heads))). With ~100 open heads you shouldn't encounter scaling issues.

You can manually close branches with hg commit --close-branch on each branch you want to close, I don't know if there is an automated way of doing it.

Upvotes: 3

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