[Python-Dev] Long term development external named branches and periodic merges from python

[Petri Lehtinen]

Nick Coghlan wrote:
> > So, in this context, if the tracker "create patch" diff from BASE, it
> > is not "safe" to merge changes from mainline to the branch, because if
> > so "create patch" would include code not related to my work.
> 
> No, "Create Patch" is smarter than that. What it does (or tries to do)
> is walk back through your branch history, trying to find the last
> point where you merged in a changeset that it recognises as coming
> from the main CPython repo. It then uses that revision of the CPython
> repo as the basis for the diff.
> 
> So if you're just working on a feature branch, periodically pulling
> from hg.python.org/cpython and merging from default, then it should
> all work fine.
> 
> Branches-of-branches (i.e. where you've merged from CPython via
> another named branch in your local repo) seems to confuse it though -
> I plan to change my workflow for those cases to merge each branch from
> the same version of default before merging from the other branch.

The ancestor() revset could help for the confusion:

    http://stackoverflow.com/a/6744163/639276

In this case, the user would have to be able to tell the branch
against which he wants the diff.

Petri