Create a new branch at a certain revision

Question

With mercurial it is easy to create a tag at a certain revision: hg tag -r <revision> <tag-name>. But how to create a branch at a certain revision?

Solution 1

Preface: Mercurial branches are two types:

• named branch
• anonymous

Named Branch

In order to get named branch BRANCHNAME, starting at REV

hg update REV
hg branch BRANCHNAME
...
hg commit

commit is a must, because

the branch will not exist in the repository until the next commit

as noted in hg help branch

Anonymous branch

hg update REV
...
hg commit

and current branch get additional head

---

hg push --new-branch

Solution 2

You could you hg clone -r <rev>. From the command line help (run hg -v help clone):

- create a repository without changesets after a particular revision:

    hg clone -r 04e544 experimental/ good/

Comments

[Lazy Badger]

Clone isn't branch per se. It will (may) appear only after hg pull|push from|to SRC repo

[Serge Belov]

@LazyBadger My bad, thanks for pointing that out. +1 to your answer.

[Francois]

problem: when doing hg update 679; hg branch mybranch; hg commit, the branch mybranch will still start at the tip of branch default, not at revision 679.

[Lazy Badger]

@Francois - check current rev after update with hg id -n