> Bob Hood <bho...@comcast.net> writes: > > There need not be, as mercurial exists now with out it. And as I said > in the paragraph right below the one you quoted, if that is the decision > of the community then at least so be it. I am pointing out that there > is a consequence to that: many people want to clone a repo, make a > change to it, and get it merged back in. And for many people, > especially in an office setting, that requires making some kind of > branch.
Yeah, mercurial doesn't have a clean branching story. If it were just named branches and bookmarks, it would be okay since it seems like there's a decent consensus on when to use each of those. I don't know what the official word is, but to me topics still feel a little experimental -- they fix some real problems with bookmarks, and I regard them as overall superior, but they feel like a parallel system that isn't 100% worked out yet. So you can successfully use one of bookmarks or topics and not really miss the other, but there's no clear-cut rule to choose between them since they're really just reimplementations of the same basic idea. I'm fine with them both existing because I think there are useful directions to explore for future design and development, and it's good to be able to innovate with topics. But it has the unfortunate side effect of confusing users. There's more than one way to do it now. And on top of that, it's tough to completely replace bookmarks in the overall picture because they're such a close match to git branches. It is very reminiscent of another confusion shared by git and hg: whether to use a merge- or rebase-based workflow. You can argue it either way. There's no 100% "right" answer, and it causes a lot of confusion. I happen to have strong opinions on this, and I am very fortunate because my opinions are always 100% correct. But that's kind of a tangent here so I won't go into it. (Besides, my answer isn't all one or the other.) _______________________________________________ Mercurial mailing list Mercurial@mercurial-scm.org https://www.mercurial-scm.org/mailman/listinfo/mercurial
