I'm trying to figure out why Mercurial thinks I'm trying to create a new remote branch in this situation:
Is it just trying to inform me that the branch will show up in the meta-data as a closed branch?
I'm on Mercurial v1.6.1023
Edit: the only branch on the remote repository is named "default"
EDIT: Misunderstood the question. The following is how you get multiple heads in one branch.
Normally a new head is created if you have a different base than the remote.
I've seen this in the following workflow:
R1 User A commits and pushes
R1 User B pulls
R2 User A commits and pushes
R? User B commits and pushes
Mercurial will decide that the push of User B is based on R1, while the server is on R2, so it will accept the changes of User B only on a different branch.
To prevent this, commit the changes of User B locally, then perform a hg pull, followed by a hg merge and merge your changes with the remote changes.
Than you can push your changes to the remote server.
Yes, even your closed branches are pushed when you do a hg push. If you want to push just default you can do a hg push -r default that then you won't see that message.
By default hg push is going to push all changesets in your local repository that are not in the remote repository. If you have some changes on a local branch (Environment_Switching in your case) -- even a closed branch -- they'll go too unless you explicitly exclude them using hg push -b default (assuming you haven't merged that branch back onto default).
To answer your question, it's just a warning that you're creating a new remote branch.
EDIT: hg push -r default and hg push -b default are equivalent. From the output for hg help revs:
Mercurial supports several ways to specify individual revisions. ...text removed for brevity... A branch name denotes the tipmost revision of that branch.
Pushing the tipmost revision of a branch will also push its ancestors, which are the rest of the changesets on the branch.