Mercurial: keep default branch “active”

Question

I am using mercurial with named branches, and notice that when I create a new branch of default, default is marked as an inactive branch. Eg:

C:\\data\\solutions         


        

Answer 1

Inactive only means it has not a head.

In your case the graph is like this:

default:        0 -\
feature-branch:     \- 1 --- *

* means the "working dir

When you do more fixes in your feature (like nodes 2 and 3) this will be the aspect:

default:        0 -\
feature-branch:     \- 1 --- 2 --- 3 ---- *

When you want to integrate feature-branch into the default just update to the default

default:        0 -\--------------------- *
feature-branch:     \- 1 --- 2 --- 3

and then merge feature-branch into the default:

default:        0 -\-------------------/- *
feature-branch:     \- 1 --- 2 --- 3 -/

The fact that it appears "inactive" is not meaning you can't work with it. For example, your "deployment scripts" can have a hg update --clean default that will perfectly work even if it appeared as "inactive".

Inactive just meant it had no heads. Nothing else. After merging it will become active and it will be feature-branch which will become "inactive".

Don't mind its active/inactive state, just work with it normally.