How to correctly close a feature branch in Mercurial?

I've finished working on a feature branch feature-x. I want to merge results back to the default branch and close feature-x in order to get rid of it in the output of hg branches.

I came up with the following scenario, but it has some issues:

$ hg up default
$ hg merge feature-x
$ hg ci -m merge
$ hg up feature-x
$ hg ci -m 'Closed branch feature-x' --close-branch

So the feature-x branch (changests 40-41) is closed, but there is one new head, the closing branch changeset 44, that will be listed in hg heads every time:

$ hg log ...
o  44 Closed branch feature-x
|
| @  43 merge
|/|
| o  42 Changeset C
| |
o |  41 Changeset 2
| |
o |  40 Changeset 1
|/
o  39 Changeset B
|
o  38 Changeset A
|

Update: It appears that since version 1.5 Mercurial doesn't show heads of closed branches in the output of hg heads anymore.

Is it possible to close a merged branch without leaving one more head? Is there more correct way to close a feature branch?

Related questions:

• Is there a downside to this Mercurial workflow: named branch "dead" head?

Solution 1:

One way is to just leave merged feature branches open (and inactive):

$ hg up default
$ hg merge feature-x
$ hg ci -m merge

$ hg heads
    (1 head)

$ hg branches
default    43:...
feature-x  41:...
    (2 branches)

$ hg branches -a
default    43:...
    (1 branch)

Another way is to close a feature branch before merging using an extra commit:

$ hg up feature-x
$ hg ci -m 'Closed branch feature-x' --close-branch
$ hg up default
$ hg merge feature-x
$ hg ci -m merge

$ hg heads
    (1 head)

$ hg branches
default    43:...
    (1 branch)

The first one is simpler, but it leaves an open branch. The second one leaves no open heads/branches, but it requires one more auxiliary commit. One may combine the last actual commit to the feature branch with this extra commit using --close-branch, but one should know in advance which commit will be the last one.

Update: Since Mercurial 1.5 you can close the branch at any time so it will not appear in both hg branches and hg heads anymore. The only thing that could possibly annoy you is that technically the revision graph will still have one more revision without childen.

Update 2: Since Mercurial 1.8 bookmarks have become a core feature of Mercurial. Bookmarks are more convenient for branching than named branches. See also this question:

• Mercurial branching and bookmarks

Solution 2:

imho there are two cases for branches that were forgot to close

Case 1: branch was not merged into default

in this case I update to the branch and do another commit with --close-branch, unfortunatly this elects the branch to become the new tip and hence before pushing it to other clones I make sure that the real tip receives some more changes and others don't get confused about that strange tip.

hg up myBranch
hg commit --close-branch

Case 2: branch was merged into default

This case is not that much different from case 1 and it can be solved by reproducing the steps for case 1 and two additional ones.

in this case I update to the branch changeset, do another commit with --close-branch and merge the new changeset that became the tip into default. the last operation creates a new tip that is in the default branch - HOORAY!

hg up myBranch
hg commit --close-branch
hg up default
hg merge myBranch

Hope this helps future readers.