Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Managing Big-Picture Branches in Repositories

The easiest way to isolate a big-picture branch in Mercurial is in a dedicated repository. If you have an existing shared repository—let’s call it myproject—that reaches a “1.0” milestone, you can start to prepare for future maintenance releases on top of version 1.0 by tagging the revision from which you prepared the 1.0 release.

$ cd myproject
$ hg tag v1.0

You can then clone a new shared myproject-1.0.1 repository as of that tag.

$ cd ..
$ hg clone myproject myproject-1.0.1
updating working directory
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

Afterwards, if someone needs to work on a bug fix that ought to go into an upcoming 1.0.1 minor release, they clone the myproject-1.0.1 repository, make their changes, and push them back.

$ hg clone myproject-1.0.1 my-1.0.1-bugfix
updating working directory
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd my-1.0.1-bugfix
$ echo 'I fixed a bug using only echo!' >> myfile
$ hg commit -m 'Important fix for 1.0.1'
$ hg push
pushing to /tmp/branch-repo8ztZpS/myproject-1.0.1
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files

Meanwhile, development for the next major release can continue, isolated and unabated, in the myproject repository.

$ cd ..
$ hg clone myproject my-feature
updating working directory
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd my-feature ...