My Mercurial Workflow (using Bookmarks)

The "master" branch...er...bookmark

I create a bookmark that always points to the latest changeset from the shared repository. I should call it "origin/master", but have been able to manage with a single 'master' bookmark. I update to the master bookmark before making changes or pulling changes,

Any changesets that I want to push are ancestors of the 'master' bookmark. I put new commits on 'master' and defer the decision to create a branch when I have changes that need to be shared at different times. For example, when you start working on a new feature, but have to go back and fix a quick defect.

Daily Flow:

hg update master
(edit, commit, edit, commit, edit, commit)

** determine I need to move previous commits to a feature branch
hg bookmark feature1

** move the 'master' bookmark back to the last shareable/pushable changeset (rev 1234)
hg bookmark -f master -r 1234
(edit, commit, edit, commit, edit, commit)

** Quit working on the non-sharable commits push the sharable changes
hg update master
hg pull --rebase
hg push -r master

** Time goes by with dozens of changesets by other....
hg pull --update (--update will move the 'master' bookmark forward)
hg update feature1 (move my working directory to my feature1 branch)
hg rebase -d master (rebase my feature1 changeset on to the latest changes)

** when these are ready to be shared
hg bookmark master -f (move the master bookmark to the changesets we want to share)
hg push -r master

Pushing (The secret sauce)

If you have local changesets on bookmarked branches that haven't been merged in to master and you attempt a push you get the "abort: push creates new remote head" error.

Include the -r (or --rev) option to only push master changesets.

-> hg push -r master
pushing to origin
searching for changes
1 changesets found
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files

Tips for Bookmarks

Keep an eye on the active bookmark. The active bookmark is denoted with an asterisk (*). When you commit, the active bookmark will update to your new commit. This is most important when you're pulling in other changes. Switching the active bookmark is done by updating the bookmark (hg update feature_1). This can be done even when the bookmarks are point to the same revision.

-> hg bookmark
   feature_1                 3097:6757f51d7d1a
 * master                    3101:0b0834be4897