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

For question 1, you need to be a little clearer about what you mean by "changes". Which of these do you mean:

1. "I want to pull some, but not all, of the changesets in a different branch into this one."
2. "I want to pull the latest version of some, but not all, of the files in a different branch into this one."

If you mean item 1, you should look into the Transplant extension, specifically the idea of cherrypicking a couple of changesets.

If you mean item 2, you would do the following:

• Update to the branch you want to pull the changes into.
• Use hg revert -r --include to change the contents of those files to the way they are on the other branch.
• Use hg commit to commit those changes to the branch as a new changeset.

As for question 2, I never use repository clones for branching myself, so I don't know. I use named branches or anonymous branches (sometimes with bookmarks).