I'm just starting to use Mercurial as a source control system. I was thinking of using the workflow similar to the one outlined here: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/05/mercurial-workflows-stable-default/. Basically, have two branches, one 'Stable' and one 'Development'. All development will be done on the 'Development' branch, and only merged into the 'Stable' branch when tested and ready for release.

o | v2.0
|\|
| o added new feature
o | V1.0
|\|
| o added new feature
| |
| o fixed bug
o |

I want to stop developers from accidentally pushing changes to the stable branch. How can I achieve this? I know there are ways of hooking into certain Mercurial events, but which one could reject a push if it made changes to the stable branch? And how can I detect that changes have been made in certain branches within a hook?

I'm running Windows 7 by the way.

UPDATE

Thanks to criswel for his answer - it pointed me in the right direction. Turns out the ACL extension (which comes with mercurial) solved this problem. I edited the 'hgrc' file in the main repo's '.hg' folder to look like this:

[extensions]
acl = 

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.acl = python:hgext.acl.hook

[acl]
sources = push

[acl.deny.branches]
stable = *

This stops anyone from making changes to the stable branch and pushing them to the main repo.

It sounds like what you want is the ACL extension, which should be included in your install of Mercurial.