This talk is about one of the ways the distributed Mercurial SCM can be used to periodically pull sets of changesets from the main FreeBSD svn repository and import them as atomic commits to a local branch.

Then we will describe two different ways to use the local branch as a basis for FreeBSD customizations: how to keep a stack of patches as a linear 'customization layer' on top of FreeBSD, and how to keep another local branch with its own merge history.