[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.