Anonymous heads are often short lived. You either merge them right away (Making them not a head), or bookmark it (Making them not anonymous) so that you can come back to it later.
But say, you forget to merge it or didn't bookmark it, Mercurial does not hide the revision from you. The hg log will list it along with all the other commits.
Even easier is to use the hg heads command, which will show all branch heads for you (Branch heads are change sets that have no descendants on the same branch), along with the commit summaries. You can use the commit summary to select the revision and use a revision id (You don't have to use the full length hash, instead you can use a 4 or 5 character prefix of the revision id) to switch to that commit.
I think it's funny how you say hg is much easier and git has a much more complex model, and I'm still struggling to understand all this.
To me Git is clear and simple. It's a linked commit-graph, and branches and tags are just references to leaf nodes on the graph. That's all. That's the entire model.
With hg you have local commit IDs, you have revsets, you have bookmarks, and then since you aren't forced to name a graph/branch you have to remember commit-IDs or who did what when to what file. Some commits show up on the commit-log, but you can't be sure if it's in the current branch. I'm totally confused as to what to use where and how I can be certain about what I'm working with.
I'm not saying hg is bad per se, but looking at it from the outside it looks helluva more complex than Git. I think this all boils down to what you're used to.
From the discussion in this thread here, I'm pretty certain I wont be trying mercurial anytime soon. It just seems too complex and confusing for me ;)
>To me Git is clear and simple. It's a linked commit-graph..
Same in Mercurial. But it lets you store a bit more meta data (Bookmarks, branch names, local revision numbers etc) which enables more powerful queries based on them. I am not sure that is a bad thing. But I can certainly understand why it appears complex to when presented with all these information at once.
But trust me, when you are trying to make sense of what went wrong with a merge done by an in experienced co-worker, you want all the metadata you can get..
>and then since you aren't forced to name a graph/branch you have to remember commit-IDs or who did what when to what file. Some commits show up on the commit-log, but you can't be sure if it's in the current branch.
Now you are talking FUD, no offence.
>you have to remember commit-IDs...
??, I just told you how to manage such cases. Which part you didn't get? In Git you would have to dig up reflogs for the commit hash for a' DETACHED HEAD' that you just made, Right?
>Some commits show up on the commit-log, but you can't be sure if it's in the current branch.
Not sure what you mean by there or where you got that idea. Every commit you make will be displayed by the hg log, regardless of the branch it is on. If you want to filter log by a branch, there is a -b option accepts branch name as an argument, that you can use to limit the display to changesets in that branch only.
>From the discussion in this thread here, I'm pretty certain I wont be trying mercurial anytime soon. It just seems too complex and confusing for me ;)
If Mercurial was actually 'complex and confusing' it would have been dead a long time ago (Thanks to git). The simple fact that it survives (and even grows in popularity) despite git, IMHO is a sure sign of how simple/straightforward it actually is for common things. So do yourself a favor and try it sometimes. You just might like it.
But say, you forget to merge it or didn't bookmark it, Mercurial does not hide the revision from you. The hg log will list it along with all the other commits.
Even easier is to use the hg heads command, which will show all branch heads for you (Branch heads are change sets that have no descendants on the same branch), along with the commit summaries. You can use the commit summary to select the revision and use a revision id (You don't have to use the full length hash, instead you can use a 4 or 5 character prefix of the revision id) to switch to that commit.