deleting a named branch

[Douglas Philips]

On 2008 Jun 13, at 5:14 AM, Martin Geisler indited:
> I like this idea. It seems lightweight and I think it would be perfect
> if there was a good way to move bookmarks back and forth between
> repositories.
>
> This includes deleting them in one repository and having the deletion
> propagate to other repositories. But this of course goes against the
> nice append-only design of Mercurial.

How is that any different than "deleting" a tag?
(Isn't that what Adrian's "closed" marker means:
http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2008-March/005607.html
and "closed" seems to be more of a social/human 'marker' than the mere  
absence of a marker on a downstream changeset...)

Overall Adrian's proposal (link above) is quite ambitious.
One thing that concerns me about having the markers on the changesets  
is that it reminds me too much of how CVS does tags by putting them on  
individual files. But perhaps I'm being overly sensitive...

This whole issue/discussion is fascinating because of the tension  
between things (tags, branch names, bookmarks etc.) being local vs.  
global or in the history vs not in the history...
I'm not sure when I "come down" on some of the issues, but it does  
seem as if it would be handy to be able to start a local private  
branch (which -if- pushed/pulled would just be another nameless head)  
and then when one is ready to "go public" one could promote the local  
tag/branch-name/bookmark to a global one. I'm not savvy on the  
internals, but I don't really have a problem with a changeset that  
"makes the announcement" (much as the way that hg tag creates a  
changeset that makes an announcement (to human readers of the log))...

--Doug