Hi Barry,
The way I work with the Subversion branches is to have all the active branches checked out into separate directories under a common parent, e.g.
~/projects/python/py26 ~/projects/python/py27 ~/projects/python/trunk ~/projects/python/py31 ~/projects/python/py32 ~/projects/python/py3k
This makes it very easy to just cd, svn up, make distclean, configure, make to test things. How can I do this with the hg clone when all the branches are in the single repository, but more or less hidden? After doing the 'hg clone' operation specified by Antoine, I'm left with a single cpython directory containing (iiuc) the contents of the 'default' branch.
Indeed, the default branch is checked out by default. But you can switch to another branch: $ hg sum parent: 68026:f12ef116dd10 tip In FTP.close() method, make sure to also close the socket object, not only the file. branch: default commit: (clean) update: (current) $ hg up 2.7 3310 files updated, 0 files merged, 378 files removed, 0 files unresolved $ hg sum parent: 68010:8174d00d0797 Merged revisions 88486 via svnmerge from branch: 2.7 commit: (clean) update: (current) ("hg sum" is a shorthand for "hg summary") Furthermore, once you have a local clone, you can clone it further to get several independent clones, and keep each of them updated on whatever branch you want. This makes it easy to replicate your workflow (by having a "master clone" - a mirror if you want - and then child clones that get updated from the master clone by running "hg pull").
I'm sure I'm not the only one who works this way with Subversion. IWBN to cover this in the devguide (or is it there and I missed it?).
Use of "hg update" to switch between branches is mentioned in http://potrou.net/hgdevguide/setup.html#getting-the-source-code and also http://potrou.net/hgdevguide/coredev.html#read-write-checkout and also in http://potrou.net/hgdevguide/committing.html#porting-within-a-major-version. But a dedicated FAQ entry could be added. Regards Antoine.