Bookmark usability issues

[David Soria Parra]

Stefan Rusek schrieb:
> After spending some time with bookmarks, I find them a pain to use.
> This is mostly due to two issues: some of the more important commands
> aren't bookmarks aware and there is no way to reference the
> non-bookmarked heads.
I don't understand your last sentence. If you cannot reference it 
without bookmarks, you have not been able to do so before introducing 
bookmarks.

> 
> Push should know about bookmarks, and provide an option to not push
> bookmarked heads. "hg push --exclude-bookmarks" would allow one to
> create a bunch of bookmarked branches, but only push the
> non-bookmarked branches.
A lot of people requested this feature. As bookmarks are not part of the 
history, we can currently not send them over the wire. We have to 
enhance the wireprotocol first. There was an attemp to do so, but as the 
wire protocol has to be extremly stable, we have to be very careful with 
those changes. There were some objections on the last attemp, and I 
never had the time to start over with that patch.

> Heads should show what heads are bookmarked. Right now one has to type
> "hg bookmarks" then "hg heads" and go back and forth between the
> outputs to figure out what is what.
> Hgk doesn't know about bookmarks either.
Definatly a good idea. We should try to do so, but I personally won't 
touch hgk, so someone else has to do that.

> If there is only one non-bookmarked head then there should be an easy
> way to refer to it. In order to "hg up" to the non-bookmarked head one
> has to do far too much work to find that head before one can update to
> it. This makes it hard to rebase the bookmark onto the main head.
hg heads; hg bookmark -r id myhead? I don't think that is complicated. 
Please notice that bookmarks are an extension too mercurial. What you 
suggest, in my opinion would involve that update knows about bookmarks, 
but the basic idea behind the extension is: If you can use bookmarks to 
do updates/lookups, etc but the extension will not change the default 
behaviour of mercurial whenever possible. Everthing else would be confusing.

For sure I'm always accepting patches to bookmarks, to get features 
other people like to have in.

David