Recently, I’ve started experimenting with Mercurial, due to the fact that it always attracted it because of its simplicity and “just works” principle. Or at least, that’s how others always described it.
They also usually described it as “practically the same as git with just a few minor changes you won’t notice” – only for me to discover it isn’t quite so.
I’m having problem with Hg branches. Pardon me if this is an overly simple question, but in git one has a working directory and a repo (.git). In the repo one has revisions, and branches, and can jump from one to another.
I’m having trouble finding a similar model in Hg. As far as I can see, for Hg to have a “branch” one needs to clone a repo to another directory? Is there a way Hg could work just like git does – i.e. one working dir., and one repo, in which you can do things as regard to branching and revs?
In Mercurial, if you go to any particular revision, you can always edit your working copy and commit, thereby making another “head.” Merging works on head revisions by default. You can use
hg headto see what heads are in your repository. This seems to be the most “idiomatic” way I have found branching to work in Mercurial.