Renaming Mercurial branches

I believe there is no need to present Mercurial (since You got here, You should be familiar with it anyway). I'd like to present a way of renaming / replacing branches. By default, without using extensions, it's impossible ("branches are permanent and global...")... but there are other ways to deal with it. Let us suppose we want to rename branch A to B. We can achieve it the following way:

hg update A
last_head=$(hg id -i)
hg ci -m "close A" --close-branch
hg update $last_head

hg branch B
hg ci -m "branche renamed to B"

This is it, now our branch is named B. In practice we just closed branched A and created a new branch B from the last commit. This activity may be visualized the following way:

Replacing an existing branch with another is a bit more tricky, here's what you have to do:

hg update A 
hg ci -m "close A" --close-branch
hg update B
hg branch A  -f #force, branch A exists
hg ci "rename to A"
#optional close branch B

The general idea may be presented the following way:

In order to create a branch that previously existed we have to use the force switch (hg branch). Nothing should go wrong if the previous head of branch A was closed, else You'll just end up creating another head.


Experimenting with hg is cool, just remember - before You try anything experimental, commit your work! This may save You a lot of nerves.

Cheers!

~KR