What is a branch?

[Bela Babik]

>  I'm new, but AFAIK, "hg branch mybranch" creates a new branch called
>  "mybranch".

No, it does not. It just assigns the "mybranch" branch name to the
working directory.

Every commit can create a branch, if the working directory's parent
node already have a child node. The hg branch command helps to
administrate/identify them. It is a kind of sticky tag because if you
don't change it, the branch name will be inherited by the next node.

I really can not imagine to work without named branches. I am tracking
changes from our SourceSafe in a named branch and I have several named
branches for my tasks. It's easy to administrate them because I use
the bug number as branch name.

teki