How to merge branches and specific 'bugfix' changesets across branches?

I am fairly new to mercurial and version control in general. I am using bitbucket and TortoiseHg. I wanted to manage my project with one stable and one dev branch. Making a branch named 'dev' was easy. Now I am about to finish current iteration and hence want to merge the dev branch into the 'default' branch. I have tried searching but to no avail.

Also I would like to confirm it again. Merging my dev branch into stable means my stable code will be replaced with the newer dev code, right? Also what should I do? Should I make a completely diffrent repo for dev or branch it in the same repo? A different repo means I can fix bugs in one and 'pu开发者_运维技巧sh' it into the other. But can the same be done with branches? if yes then how?

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If stable and dev are named branches in the same repository, then to merge dev into stable, you switch to stable and do a merge:

$ hg up stable
$ hg merge dev

You might want to check out the docs for hg resolve in case there are merge conflicts that can't be resolved.

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About moving a specific changeset to another branch you might want to check out hg transplant