[rkangel]

Mercurial does absolutely not require you copying at the fs level. You're not the first person to be caught out by that tutorial, which I think would serve us best by being deleted.

The 'original' branching method for Mercurial is called Named Branches. The big difference with Git is that every commit is labelled with what branch it is on. This has advantages - if you imagine looking at the train track of 'master' in git with it's divergence for a few commits and then merge, you can see that the 3 commits were on a branch called 'performance', whereas with git that history is completely lost. See: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/NamedBranches

As usage of git grew, the git branching model gained popularity and so the Mercurial bookmarks extension was created (https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/Bookmarks).

It can be seen as a downside that there are two branching options that you have to choose between.

[coldpie]

It's not just that tutorial, see also [1,2]. I think this is/was really an "official" way to do branching, and it seems utter madness to me :)

[1] Sadly the popular hginit.com seems dead, this was my first introduction to Mercurial. https://web.archive.org/web/20180722012242/http://hginit.com...

[2] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-m...

[jordigh]

Branching by cloning was copied from bitkeeper. It was also early git's only branching mechanism. If you listen to Linus's talk when he introduced git at Google, you'll hear him conflate "branch" with "clone" because that's what he was thinking of at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

[rkangel]

I associate that particular madness with Bazaar rather than Mercurial. It stopped being standard practice a while ago, and those old tutorials should be updated or removed.