queue top not at dirstate parents

[David Montgomery]

Hi,

I'm getting started with Mercurial Queues.

I've read http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbookch12.html
(but not the rest of the book).  It seems that this is just
the tool I need for some current work, where I have a
set of patches I want to apply to an upstream codebase
that is changing.

Yesterday I tried using mq for the first time, and it seemed
to work fine.

After I finished with the work on the patch I pushed my
changes to a central repository I use, and later I pulled
some unrelated changes from the same place.  Along
the way I had to do a branch merge (no files changed).

Today I was going to revise the patch that I wrote yesterday.
There's only one patch, in both qseries and qapplied.

I find now that if I do qrefresh or qpop that I get the
message: "queue top not at dirstate parents" and it
shows the revisions for the time at which I applied the
patch (the 'top') and for the current tip.

I'm not certain, but it seems that perhaps when using
mq I'm supposed to do an qpop -a each time before doing
a pull and update.  Then I can do a qpush -a to get back
to my patched state. Is that right?  It seems pretty
inconvenient.

In any event, I didn't do that.  And now I'm in a state where
"queue top not at dirstate parents", so I can't do a qpop -a.

Any suggestions on how to get past this would be much
appreciated!

David