Thu 13 October 2011 | -- (permalink)

At work we've been talking a lot lately about how to branch and merge code when we do releases and build new features.  It's a fundamental law of the internet that every git vs mercurial flamewar must include a comment along the lines of "they're both pretty much equivalent, just pick one".  This leads to the impression that commands in one mean pretty much the same thing as corresponding commands in the other.  When it comes to the 'branch' command, this assumption gets you into trouble.

The short version: If you think you should do a 'git branch', you're probably right.  If you think you should do a 'hg branch', there's a pretty good chance you're wrong.

Further reading:

• BranchingExplained, from the Mercurial wiki.
• BookmarksExtension, from the Mercurial wiki. I haven't tried it yet, but bookmarks look like a nice way to do temporary branches when you're trying out a new feature.
• Steve Losh's Guide to Branching in Mercurial