best practices in mercurial: branch vs. clone, and partial merges?

Question

...so I\'ve gotten used to the simple stuff with Mercurial (add, commit, diff) and found out about the .hgignore file (yay!) and have

Answer 1

I use clone for:

• Short-lived local branches
• Cloning to different development machines and servers

The former use is pretty rare for me - mainly when I'm trying an idea I might want to totally abandon. If I want to merge, I'll want to merge ALL the changes. This sort of branching is mainly for tracking different developers' branches so they don't disturb each other. Just to clarify this last point:

• I keep working on my changes and pull my fellow devs changes and they pull mine.
• When it's convenient for me I'll merge ALL of the changes from one (or all) of these branches into mine.

For feature branches, or longer lived branches, I use named branches which are more comfortably shared between repositories without merging. It also "feels" better when you want to selectively merge.

Basically I look at it this way:

• Named branches are for developing different branches or versions of the app
• Clones are for managing different contributions to the same version of the app.

That's my take, though really it's a matter of policy.