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We are just switching to Mercurial where I work this week. I'm starting to read material, and was hoping somebody could succinctly answer this question:

What's the difference between Mercurial's "tip" tag and the "default" branch?

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tip can be on a different branch than default.

hg uses the latest revision your "-r somewhat" matches. if somewhat is a branch, it updates to its latest head. if somewhat is a tag it updates to the revision this tag is associated with.

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up vote 4 down vote

Tip is the most recent changeset in the repository. Default is a branch. Tip is a special Tag (a named changeset) which always refers to the most recently changed Head.

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So does this mean that tip will move around from one branch to another as people push changesets on different branches? If so, what's the point of it, since you can't rely on it being in any one place? Thanks! – Jonathan Hartley Nov 22 '10 at 20:40
True, I can't think of any usecases for Tip aside from checking how old my repo is or sharing the id of my tip when talking with other developers. Also as giszmo points out, hg update -r tip is a quick way to get to the newest code regardless of branch. – Daniel Rucci Nov 22 '10 at 21:06
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