how can you tell you have merged?

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 11.09.2008 19:14, Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 02:15 -0400, Douglas Philips wrote:
>> On or about 2008 Sep 11, at 2:13 AM, Patrick Waugh indited:
>>> hg clone hello my-new-hello
>>> cd my-new-hello
>>> sed -i '/printf/i\\tprintf("once more, hello.\\n");' hello.c
>>> hg commit -m 'A new hello for a new day.'
>>> hg pull ../my-hello
>>> hg merge
>>>
>>> Now, how can you tell that you have done a merge?
>>>
>>> So, since I'm still seeing two heads, how would I know (if I left,
>>> came back and had forgot I had done a merg) that the merge was
>>> complete but that I still needed a commit?
>> hg parents
> 
> There is apparently a large flaw in our documentation such that many
> users are unaware of this essential basic command. It should be one of
> the first concepts they learn. How do we fix it?
> 

The term "working directory's parent" is inherently tricky,
because "working directory" means something else outside of
Mercurial.

I guess people just double overlook that.

Besides, people don't read anyway. Which is another problem.

And maybe, users coming from other version control systems
are not prepared to the notion of the working copy (the whole tree)
having a state attached to it. They maybe know about the concept
of individual files being "at a revision", but not the whole
tree.

Let alone understanding how to merge two different states
of the tree vs just merging single files.

Maybe some good writer sees a way how to improve wiki pages
UnderstandingMercurial and QuickStart.

As a side note, wiki pages WorkingDirectory and TutorialMerge
clearly talk about parents. TutorialMerge also has an example
hg parents call inside the context of the tutorial.