How to correctly close a feature branch in Mercurial?

Question

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

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.

EDIT ouch, too late... I know read your comment stating that you want to keep the feature-x changeset around, so the cloning approach here doesn't work.

I'll still let the answer here for it may help others.

If you want to completely get rid of "feature X", because, for example, it didn't work, you can clone. This is one of the method explained in the article and it does work, and it talks specifically about heads.

As far as I understand you have this and want to get rid of the "feature-x" head once and for all:

@    changeset:   7:00a7f69c8335
|\   tag:         tip
| |  parent:      4:31b6f976956b
| |  parent:      2:0a834fa43688
| |  summary:     merge
| |
| | o  changeset:   5:013a3e954cfd
| |/   summary:     Closed branch feature-x
| |
| o  changeset:   4:31b6f976956b
| |  summary:     Changeset2
| |
| o  changeset:   3:5cb34be9e777
| |  parent:      1:1cc843e7f4b5
| |  summary:     Changeset 1
| |
o |  changeset:   2:0a834fa43688
|/   summary:     Changeset C
|
o  changeset:   1:1cc843e7f4b5
|  summary:     Changeset B
|
o  changeset:   0:a9afb25eaede
   summary:     Changeset A

So you do this:

hg clone . ../cleanedrepo --rev 7

And you'll have the following, and you'll see that feature-x is indeed gone:

@    changeset:   5:00a7f69c8335
|\   tag:         tip
| |  parent:      4:31b6f976956b
| |  parent:      2:0a834fa43688
| |  summary:     merge
| |
| o  changeset:   4:31b6f976956b
| |  summary:     Changeset2
| |
| o  changeset:   3:5cb34be9e777
| |  parent:      1:1cc843e7f4b5
| |  summary:     Changeset 1
| |
o |  changeset:   2:0a834fa43688
|/   summary:     Changeset C
|
o  changeset:   1:1cc843e7f4b5
|  summary:     Changeset B
|
o  changeset:   0:a9afb25eaede
   summary:     Changeset A

I may have misunderstood what you wanted but please don't mod down, I took time reproducing your use case : )

It is strange, that no one yet has suggested the most robust way of closing a feature branches... You can just combine merge commit with --close-branch flag (i.e. commit modified files and close the branch simultaneously):

hg up feature-x
hg merge default
hg ci -m "Merge feature-x and close branch" --close-branch
hg branch default -f

So, that is all. No one extra head on revgraph. No extra commit.