Why do some changes in TortoiseHG show as not having lines between them in the workbench?

Question

One of our developers checked in some bogus changesets. The changesets were weird in that if you update to them they only contain a tiny subset of our project even though they do not show any file deletion actions. 2) they show up in Kiln (online repo tool) as well as TortoiseHG as having no lines between them

Does this mean the commits somehow have no parent? How is this possible? What is going on here?

Answer 1

This simply means that commits 19-23 are both heads and roots of your repository. You can create that by always doing hg up null before doing hg add and hg commit. It also happens if the user always started a repository from scratch, then pushed them all with --force (to avoid the "unrelated" abort) to your repo.

That said, the commits are not "bogus" in the VCS sense, but are a strong indication that the committer needs HG training, at least regarding your workflow.