[apgwoz]

> Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward.

That may be true (honestly, I don't know), but I haven't yet needed to maintain different branches of projects I'm working on and so it's a non-issue at this point. If at some point it becomes an issue, and I find Mercurial lacking, then of course I'll take a closer look at git, who probably does it more appropriately.

[mleonhard]

It's a good idea to make a branch for each release. Then you can easily look at the code that's in production and make patches.