What are patch queues? Patch queues are collections of raw patches that are managed by Mercurial. Unlike the commits in a normal Mercurial fork or branch, which are immutable, the changes recorded in a patch queue can be edited, deleted, reordered, and merged, and may be removed or applied at will from a given repository. This makes patch queues ideal for:
* Developing features you intend to submit for upstream review
Because patches in patch queues can be modified, they provide an ideal way to develop a feature in a history-tracked manner, while still allowing you to easily incorporate feedback
* Experimenting with adding a new feature
Patch queues don't clutter your project's history, so you can safely use them as a way to quickly try out an idea, and keeping it in version control, without cluttering up your project's history with failed excursions. If you decide to keep the experiment, you can easily turn a patch queue into a set of traditional Mercurial commits
* Maintaining private customizations for another project
Because patch queues are not part of the official change log for a project, they are ideal for maintaining private customizations for an upstream project. For example, you might maintain a patch queue that makes program better integrate with your company's workflow
Conversely, patch queues are not good for:
* Long-running branches
Because patch queues are highly volatile, they do a poor job tracking the long-term history of your source code. For this reason, long-running branches, such as those that correspond to product releases, should be kept in repositories or named branches.
* Group development
Patch queues do not track merge history, which makes them a poor choice for doing group development, where you really wish to see when a given set of features was merged into a repository.
When in doubt, you should stick to a traditional fork, but mastering the power of patch queues will give you tremendous flexibility in your workflow, and provide you with greatly enhanced collaboration abilities.

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