Question

With a mercurial repository, after initialising it, do I need to commit to the master branch first, before creating another named branch, or can I do:

hg init
hg branch develop

and then commit onto the develop branch, before at some stage merging develop into the master.

Answer 1

Mercurial really doesn’t have the concept of a master branch; they are all equal and all hg changesets belong to one and only one branch. There is a convention of naming the initial branch as default and that name is used until you create a new branch, but you don’t need to use that name. In your case, since the initial commit is made to a branch named develop, no other branch names exist, including default, until you subsequently create and commit one.

Without using a branch command:

$ hg init
$ hg branches
$ touch a
$ hg add
adding a
$ hg comm -m 'initial commit to default'
$ hg branches
default                        0:c3eac81383bd

Using a branch command:

$ hg init
$ hg branch develop
marked working directory as branch develop
$ touch a
$ hg add
adding a
$ hg commit -m 'on develop'
$ hg branches
develop                        0:f0170c7bcdcf
$ hg branch default
marked working directory as branch default
$ touch b
$ hg add b
$ hg commit -m 'on default'
$ hg branches
default                        1:0668d80655ff
develop                        0:f0170c7bcdcf (inactive)
$ ls
a  b
$ hg update develop  # change working directory back to develop branch
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 1 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ ls
a