> Ignore them — you do know, what are you doing, right?
No, I don't :). I heavily rely on my CVS to never loose any data and to be able to go back to a previous state whenever I need to. This works great with Git's reflog.
> That's not true. Backups are written to .hg/strip-backup directory, which isn't tracked.
I stand corrected then. Maybe I'm mixing that up with amend or revert? I last used mercurial 9 months ago, but believe to remember there was some command that left .orig files lying around and that if you applied a history rewrite command several times those backups were overwritten with the new backups and you weren't able to come back all the way.
> there was some command that left .orig files lying around
Only way .orig files may pop up is failure to replay rebased commit(s). No way these are backups — their purpose is to make user able to fix things and continue.
> Histedit extension which is meant to provide this feature has warnings all over the place
Ignore them — you do know, what are you doing, right?
> changeset backups written to locations in the working tree
That's not true. Backups are written to .hg/strip-backup directory, which isn't tracked.