How to merge two branches in Mercurial when there is nothing to merge

Question

I\'m new to mercurial and I\'m trying to do something really simple but can\'t figure out how to. I created a branch to do some experimentation without disturbing the main b

Answer 1

Once you've created a branch, you can't exactly achieve a single default branch (with some exceptions, see below). However, you should be able to merge experiment into default and achieve the same thing.

If you start with this:

and perform this:

hg update trunk
hg merge experiment

you should end up with this:

Other options:

Using rebase or a patch queue you could actually relocate the changesets on the experiment branch back on to default. This would basically remove the experiment named branch and create a few more default changesets. You cannot do this, however, if you've already shared the changesets form the first image, above, with another user.