x.zpuppet.org

When reading the many git-vs-mercurial blog posts I noticed lots of comments about how mercurial lacked the lightweight branching of git.  Then came a lot of rebuttals saying “well hg has bookmarks, so that’s not true anymore”.  But when I tried them, I was surprised by their behaviour.  If you had two bookmarks pointing to the same changeset, they both would move as you create new child changesets.  But with the 1.2 release of hg coming out soon, an updated version of the bookmarks extension will be included.   It has a configuration option (which I wish was the default but cannot be due to backwards compatibility) called track.current.  To enable this behaviour, you’ll need this in your rc file:

[extensions]
hgext.bookmarks =

[bookmarks]
track.current = True

Here’s a workflow that I find useful.  You might start off your day by looking at issues in your project tracker and creating a todo list of what issues you want to tackle.  Instead of writing them on a post-it, let’s use bookmarks:

$ hg bookmark issue11
$ hg bookmark issue12
$ hg bookmarks
   issue11                   216:ca8cec4bf890
   issue12                   216:ca8cec4bf890

You’ll notice none of them appear active even though they point to the current changeset which matches our
working copy.

$ hg up issue11
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ hg bookmarks
 * issue11                   216:ca8cec4bf890
   issue12                   216:ca8cec4bf890

Let’s start hacking on issue11,

*hack* *hack*
$ hg ci -m"fixing issue11"
*hack* *hack*
$ hg ci -m"still fixing 11"
$ hg bookmarks
 * issue11                   218:cdc9e873455d
   issue12                   216:ca8cec4bf890

At this point, we haven’t yet created a branch:

Our work on issue11 is still not finished, but we’re bored with and want to work on something else for a while. So let’s do some work on issue12:

$ hg up -C issue12
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
*hack* *hack*
$ hg ci -m"fixing issue12"
created new head
*hack* *hack*
$ hg ci -m"done fixing 12"

Now we we’re happy with our fix and are done with 12. Back to issue 11.

$ hg up -C issue11
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
*hack* *hack*
$ hg ci -m"done fixing 11"

Merge in changes from issue12, (could have done this earlier):

$ hg merge issue12
merging file
0 files updated, 1 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)
$ hg ci -m"merge"

We’re done with these bookmarks for now so delete them:

$ hg bookmark -d issue12
$ hg bookmark -d issue11