What Is So Wrong With Mercurial's Named Branches?
I just installed the very latest version of mercurial, 2.0.2 . It added a new little feature that warns you when you create a branch. Huh? This is what it looks like: $ hg branch foo marked working directory as branch foo (branches are permanent and global, did you want a bookmark?) Really? Have we let the git advocates push us this far? Do we really need to start discouraging named branches? I googled around to see if I could find where the self-hate for mercurial's named branches is coming from and I found things like this , "it is almost never a good idea to use this facility for short-term branching, since branches created this way are inherently 'eternal'." (those quotes around eternal are good, actually, but you didn't explain why they should be there), and this , "you can never really delete branches (since that would mean altering older commits)." (editing history, oh noes!), and others like this. And these were all written by a