The Flow of Changes: Big Picture Versus Little Picture
To return to the outline I sketched at the beginning of the chapter, let’s think about a project that has multiple concurrent pieces of work under development at once.
There might be a push for a new “main” release; a new minor bug fix release to the last main release; and an unexpected “hot fix” to an old release that is now in maintenance mode.
The usual way people refer to these different concurrent directions of development is as “branches.” However, we’ve already seen numerous times that Mercurial treats all of history as a series of branches and merges. Really, what we have here are two ideas that are peripherally related, but which happen to share a name.
“Big picture” branches represent the sweep of a project’s evolution; people give them names, and talk about them in conversation.
“Little picture” branches are artefacts of the day-to-day activity of developing and merging changes. They expose the narrative of how the code was developed.
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