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Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

Your description is correct for tags, a little off for branches.

You don't have to switch to master to create a branch, you have to switch to the branch you want to branch off of, which is the same as git. Also, all branches are visible and accessible from any branch/revision, unlike tags.

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Git is not the same in this case. Since git branches are just refs, I can do whatever commits or other changes I want and then assign a branch name. With hg every commit you make must first be done on the branch you want. This, when understood fully, can allow git to be much more flexible when manipulating the tree.

If you don't want mercurial named branches then don't use them. Use mercurial bookmarks instead. They can do everything a git branch can do. Mercurial also has anonymous heads that actually allow Mercurial to be much more flexible than git.

You can rebase mercurial commits to a branch after the fact. As others point out you can also use bookmarks that are very similar to git branches, and you can also commit with no branch or bookmark at all and mercurial won't hide or garbage collect those commits (unless you tell it too). It's actually more flexible than git.

Git does default to the current HEAD, but it allows you to specify a start point if you want to. Doing this with git branch might be useful if you have changes you haven't committed and can't git stash for some reason.

See man git-branch and man git-checkout for details.

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