Workflow for Mercurial repositories with BuildMaster deployment

Question

Right now we only have a development repository and need to start getting ready for test and production environments. We are planning to use BuildMaster for CI and deployments. The normal workflow that I see is to checkout source code from HG, then create build artifacts that are used when you promote/deploy to the different environments. This workflow seems to assume that you only have a single repository/branch in use. How would it work if you had separate branches/repos for dev and stable/release?

Answer 1

It's possible to create this workflow with multiple repositories.

As of v4.1 (code), the Mercurial Extension does not support branching - but it's definitely on the roadmap. Ideally, it would operate like the Git Extension. Now in v4.2, selecting a branch is now part of the source path, so it can be access with variables or selected from the FileFolder picker directly under the repository root.

You can, however, set up a Mercurial provider to use multiple repositories. To do this, just click the "Add additional repository..." link on the provider configuration page:

That will show the repositories list for the provider:

And then you can just continue to add multiple repositories from there: