Mercurial Working Practices

This page documents some ways to use Mercurial. Because the software is flexible, there's no "right way", but some methods are more scalable than others. These are a few tips for creating a scaleable workflow.

First, merge often! This makes merging easier for everyone and you find out about conflicts (which are often rooted in incompatible design decisions) earlier.

Second, don't hesitate to use multiple trees locally. Mercurial makes this fast and light-weight. Typical usage is to have an incoming tree, an outgoing tree, and a separate tree for each area being worked on.

The incoming tree is best maintained as a pristine copy of the upstream repository. This works as a cache so that you don't have to pull multiple copies over the network. No need to check files out here as you won't be changing them.

The outgoing tree contains all the changes you intend for merge into upstream. Publish this tree with hg serve or hgweb or use hg push to push it to another publicly available repository.

Then, for each feature you work on, create a new tree. Commit early and commit often, merge with incoming regularly, and once you're satisfied with your feature, pull the changes into your outgoing tree.

Other ways to collaborate

Mercurial development practices resemble those described in KernelPractice.

Backup practices

To maintain a backup of commits, you can clone a repository and push your changes to it periodically.

See also

• How to write good changeset comments

• The naming of repositories is important, because you'll probably have lots of them

• Dealing with contributions from multiple committers

• More Workflows with usecase and requirements

CategoryHowTo