Which merge strategies does mercurial use?

Question

I work in an environment with large scale multi-parallel branching. Looking at GIT I see it has several merge strategies:

already up-to-date
fast-forward
octopus
resolve
recursive

Does Mercurial have the equivalent of each of these? (ie is the implementation of Mercurial's merge algorithm as good as recursive?

Answer 1

• already up-to-date
• fast-forward

Those aren't merge strategies, I guess the first one is when there's nothing to merge (obviously supported). The second isn't a merge, updating in hg is equivalent to fast-forward (there's nothing to merge).

• octopus

Doesn't apply to mercurial, merges are always between two heads.

• resolve

That's the default merge strategies.

• recursive

Could probably be done with a custom merge script (hg, like git just call external tools to handle the merge). But nobody seemed interested in it for now, maybe because it doesn't bring a lot of improvements compared to resolve.