Sure you can make do without the index, that doesn't mean it's better not to have it. I personally don't feel comfortable with mercurial, but that may be becau

Sure you can make do without the index, that doesn't mean it's better not to have it. I personally don't feel comfortable with mercurial, but that may be because I don't understand it. It's been a long time since I last touched it, but I remember thinking that the way it does branches was just needlessly complicated and cumbersome. Why does closing a branch even need to be a thing? > you don't need the index for this, you need to track conflict state This is what the index does. You don't need the index in mercurial, because you have something that is like the index, but not called the index. Maybe the UI is better because "add" is called resolve, but that is really just an alias away. > and then ... what? Then you push it to remote somewhere and a CI system runs tests for you. Maybe you can do something productive in the meantime. If you're just testing locally, then there's little difference, but I would still prefer testing a committed state, knowing it's safe in the repository and I can't clobber it afterwards.