Blocking write-access to a specific branch in a single mercurial repository

Question

Is it possible to write some manner of hook in mercurial that will reject changesets that effect a specific named branch in a repository?

We have a managed project and would like to allow any developers to push their changes to our repository so long as they are in their own named branch. We'd like to block any attempts to write to the default branch from outsiders (we would, internally, merge their branches over).

Answer 1

It looks like you could do this with pretxnchangegroup or pretxncommit, but you'd have to do the legwork (poking into the changesets and finding out which branch they affect) yourself.

See the Mercurial book section on hooks

Answer 2

With a small registration process, you could give each of them a complete repository, which admittadly isn't quite as convient as branches. A variation is to us a service like BitBucket to handle some of the fork tracking for you.