Why? It was a widely anticipated and announced feature. The standard way mercurial added new features was to gate them behind configs and only after they were

Why? It was a widely anticipated and announced feature. The standard way mercurial added new features was to gate them behind configs and only after they were widely tested turning them on by default. This is a good thing! Prior to shelve being included with the mercurial distribution a third party extension was available going back to 1.x (or perhaps before I started using it around 1.8). And get this, it also prioritized ergonomics and was largely just adapted directly.