When to branch, tag & merge in Mercurial?

Question

When should one branch/tag in Mercurial ( hg ), both at the local repo level and at the centralized/originating repo (that you hg clone )? When should you merge (again at the local level and in the central repo)?

I come from a SVN background where branches were used for new features (" feature branches "), as well as " release branches ". In the case of feature branches, a developer would create a branch if he/she knew a project was going to span multiple sprints/releases. The feature branch would then be merged back in once the developer was certain they'd be releasing the new feature during the given sprint. The release branch would then be created and deployed to QA and a staging environemnt for QAT/UAT testing respectively. Any bugs that arose during testing would be committed directly to the release branch. When the release branch was finally ready to be released, it would be tagged (for archival/record-keeping purposes) and then finally, after the release branch was deployed live, it would be merged back with trunk.

How does this process change with a DVCS such as hg ?

Answer 1

Branching|merging policy can does not differ at all. These processes just give less headache in Mercurial (you will not be a victim of "Refactoring Hell" with a minimal level of accuracy, unfamous Tree Conflicts are also history) - DVCS vs CVCS will change almost nothing here, Mercurial give you just more freedom: branch when|if you want