I have two machines, A and B that both access an external hg repository.

I did some development on A, wasn't ready to push changesets to the external, and needed to switch machines, so I pushed the changesets to B using hg serve. Changesets continued on B, were committed and then pushed to external repo.

I then pulled on A and updated to default/tip. This left the local changesets that had previously been pushed to B as a branch, but because of how I pushed things around, the changes in the local changesets are already in default/tip.

I've now continued to make changes and commit locally on A, but when I try to push hg asks me to merge or do push -f instead. I know push -f is almost never recommended. This situation is close to one where I should use rebase, however the changesets that would be "rebased" I don't really need locally or in the external repository since they are already effectively in default/tip via the push to B.

Now, I know I could merge with the latest local changeset and just discard the changes, but then I would still have to commit the merge which gets me back into rebase territory.

Is this a case where I could do hg push -f?

Also, why would pushing from A create remote heads if I've updated to default/tip before I continued to commit changesets?