Disabling default-push in Mercurial

(I may have already posted this, but cannot find it at this time.)

On a few occasions I have embarrassed myself by pushing to the project master repository accidentally, when I meant to push to my rep where I keep all of my history. (My project requires me to collapse fine grain commits to a much smaller number of coarse gran commits, losing history but keeping the log small. I keep meaning to try mq for this.)

Some folks on stackoverflow *almost* describe how to do this.

Although the post has a bug, which I have fixed. I would post the fix to stackoverflow, except it is down right now, far enough that I am not sure that the below is the correct URL

http://stackoverflow.com/can-you-prevent-default-push-but-allow-pull

Here is the my current BKM to disable default-push:

I've embellished the idea of setting paths.default-push in ~/.hgrc, making it a little bit more self documenting and less error-prone - since, as I point out below, setting default-push = . does not always disable pushing.

in ~/.hgrc

    [paths]

    # my main project master repo

    project-master = ...

   

    #DISABLING IMPLICIT PUSH

    #     to prevent embarassment from accidentally pushing to the project master repo

    #     instead of, in my case, a repo that has fine grain commits

    #     that the rest of the team does not want to see in the project master repo

    #default-push = .

    #     this works mostly, but NOT if you use hg on your home directory

    #     since '.' in ~/.hgrc seems to be interpreted as -R ~

    #default-push = /NONEXISTENT_default-push_--_must_specify_push_target_explicity

    #     this works ok, but I can clean up the error message using blanks

    #     keeping this around because blanks in pathnames cionfuse many tools

    default-push = /'NONEXISTENT default-push -- must specify push target explicitly'

    #     this amounts to disabling implicit push targets.