What does hg bookmark mean in this context?

Question

I am reading through Chris's excellent article about working with git and pushing to BitBucket. With the instructions presented there, I managed to get everything working. However, I would like to understand what happens there. I'm specifically interested in this line:

hg bookmark hg/default -r default

I understand that this creates a bookmark named hg/default , but why does it have default as a revision? What does this mean?

Answer 1

The -r (or --rev ) tells Mercurial that the bookmark should be set to the head of the default branch.

Using this technique, you set a bookmark to a revision other than that of your working copy.

This is documented in hg help bookmark .

Answer 2

If no branch name is set manually, Mercurial assigns the branch name default .

default is the name of a particular path of changes (change sets) and in this case it is used to create your bookmark.