title: Is there a downside to this Mercurial workflow: named branch "dead" head?
body: <p>I love the flexibility of named branches but I have some concerns about the prolifieration of heads.</p>
  
  <p>Even when the branch is closed, it still shows up in the heads.  I have an idea for how to clean up the output from "hg heads"
  My question to the gurus: "What am I missing?"</p>
  
  <p>First off you may ask, Why might I want to totally hide the head of a named branch? For various reasons:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>the feature is a bad idea</li>
  <li>the feature is a good idea that is not ready for merging to tip, but maybe in a few months</li>
  <li>the branch is a patch release to an older tagged version</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>edit:</strong>  It turns out the prolifiration of heads is a symptom of the older version of mercurial I was using.  Closing the branch hides the head of the branch it on newer Mercurial versions.</p>
  
  <p><strike>My idea is to have a "dead" head branch onto which all these closed branch heads will be merged.<br>
  The dead head would be parented by changeset 0 and serve the sole purpose of bundling up the stray heads that are not needed right now.</p>
  
  <p>The deadhead has only other deadhead children, which never get merged back into the default branch.  </strike></p>