The scene: A purchased web application, with regular updates from the vendor. We then, heavily customize the look and sometimes add our own functionality or fix a bug before the vendor gets to it. For version control, we have been using Subversion following their “Vendor Branch” model each time we received a new release. This has the added benefit that we have a, version controlled, vanilla copy of their system.
The problem: We would like to switch to Mercurial and will likely follow the stable/default branching pattern. Mercurial makes perfect sense if we were to only receive a single release from our vendor and start developing it from there. But, for whatever reason, I am having trouble wrapping my mind around how to handle future releases from the vendor.
The plea: Any help with “vendor branching” Mercurial style would be greatly appreciated.