how to organise and maintain mercurial repository

At the moment I have 5 differently branded products with almost the same codebase (the diff开发者_开发知识库erences are brand related) and all those products live in the separated mercurial branches.

Bug fixing and development is done in the default branch and all changes are transplanted to the branches with hg transplant command. This approach is working but number of the brands might be increased it'll take longer to keep all branches in up to date state.

I'm wondering if there is any other/easier way for this task.

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Using transplant in this case sounds like overkill. You should simply be making the bugfix changes in the default branch and use hg pull (on the branded repositories) and merge the changes on all of the branded repositories.

transplant was added to Mercurial to allow for cherry-picking changesets that needed a special case to go backward in the normal flow of changesets (i.e. a single change introduced in the fork/branch needs to be spliced into the original repository)