Don't delude yourself that there's anything correct about storing the name of a branch in a commit, or that that's what makes up a proper branch.
When I receive a changeset in mercurial and see that it was made on a branch called "dev", that means nothing to me. When I get changes from several locations and they all say it was made on "dev", that helps me even less.
If it's actually important to you to know that a change was done on a branch called "dev" (and I doubt it ever will be), it's fairly easy to know just by examining the merge commit that brought it in.
In practice, I'd say it's just confusing. I wrote "hg log -b" initially for viewing logs only within a branch. As it turns out, you have to be really careful to name your branches since they can be reused (or worse as shown above) and it's very difficult to figure out whether a change occurred on a given branch or a different branch that had the same name.
Comments
Don't delude yourself that there's anything correct about storing the name of a branch in a commit, or that that's what makes up a proper branch.
When I receive a changeset in mercurial and see that it was made on a branch called "dev", that means nothing to me. When I get changes from several locations and they all say it was made on "dev", that helps me even less.
If it's actually important to you to know that a change was done on a branch called "dev" (and I doubt it ever will be), it's fairly easy to know just by examining the merge commit that brought it in.
In practice, I'd say it's just confusing. I wrote "hg log -b" initially for viewing logs only within a branch. As it turns out, you have to be really careful to name your branches since they can be reused (or worse as shown above) and it's very difficult to figure out whether a change occurred on a given branch or a different branch that had the same name.