Tag temporary changes in Mercurial

Question

We are working with Mercurial for a year now, but today a question arised about how to handle (or better: identify) files that have been edited temporarely.

The user that asked me how to do it is currently switching from ClearCase to Mercurial. In ClearCase you could use 'hijacked files' to distinguish between changes that should be commited, and changes that should be reverted.

In Mercurial (using TortoiseHg) I couldn't find any similar solution to achieve this.

Long story short: How can you distinguish between files that were edited temporarely during development from files that were edited for getting committed.

What is your advice / best practice for this kind of situation?

Answer 1

MQ patch for files with temporary changes, commits for permanent changes (user must know, which files are in every category)

On commit, user can exclude some modified files from changeset and use later these files for refreshing (applied) patch.

Forgetting these changes is just unapply patch