[Python-Dev] Mercurial migration: progress report (PEP 385)

[P.J. Eby]

At 12:20 PM 7/4/2009 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>IME, Mercurial strongly encourages a non-branching style.  Although I
>can't fully explain in concrete terms what makes me feel that way,
>it's certainly consistent with your own inclination to advise "subset
>branches".  Part of it comes from the fact that you can't have a
>single revision on two branches.  I would really like the node of a
>release branch to be on both the branch and the mainline so that the
>tag appears in the history of both, but that's not possible.

I'm a total newbie to Mercurial - I've basically done little more 
than the tutorial, in fact.  So somebody correct me if what I'm about 
to say is completely stupid.

Wouldn't the simple thing to do in Mercurial, just be to use 
different repositories for long-lived branches?  I mean, if you're 
not merging them that much anyway, what's the point?  Isn't it just 
as easy to pull from another repository, as from another branch 
within that repository?