Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Branch Naming Is Generally Useful

You shouldn’t think of named branches as applicable only to situations where you have multiple long-lived branches cohabiting in a single repository. They’re very useful even in the one-branch-per-repository case.

In the simplest case, giving a name to each branch gives you a permanent record of which branch a changeset originated on. This gives you more context when you’re trying to follow the history of a long-lived branchy project.

If you’re working with shared repositories, you can set up a pretxnchangegroup hook on each that will block incoming changes that have the “wrong” branch name. This provides a simple, but effective, defense against people accidentally pushing changes from a “bleeding edge” branch to a “stable” branch. Such a hook might look like this inside the shared repo’s /.hgrc.

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.branch = hg heads --template '{branches} ' | grep mybranch