How do you prevent your Mercurial (or Git) branches from being locked up?

I want to throw this scenario out there and see what the most objective, vanilla-Mercurial way to fix this would be.

Suppose I have the following branches in my centralized Mercurial repository for my centralized, non-distributed web-app:

repository
    default
    feature1
    feature2
    bugs

Suppose ten developers have committed fixes to the 'bugs' branch and pushed. Now let's say it comes time to release. So, I do some final tests, and suddenly, I notice a problem with a bug fix--and this problem is going to take a few additional hours to fix. So, now I have super critical bug fixes that have to be released, but the 'bugs' branch is locked up, and I can't merge into the 'default' branch and release because the half-fixed bug will also be released, and I can't let that happen.

So what do I do?

Should I revert the change in the bugs branch, merge bugs into default, and release? What if there are ten commits associated with this particular problem-bug-fix--find and revert all those? That sounds hairy, but let's say I do that. What about when the developer who has to fix the problem-bug-fix pulls and updates his repository? His changes will all be reverted. He COULD un-revert the revert…is that the way to go?

Another option would be to do some kind of cherry picking and merge just the cha开发者_JAVA百科nges I want to release from the 'bugs' branch, minus the problem-bug-fix commits, into the 'default' branch. But this sounds even hairier than the previously-proposed solution.

What do you all do?

I would create a new branch (to make the release):

• starting from the current "locked" branch bug
• with a revert of the problematic bug-fix

And I would leave the "bug" branch as it is. No cherry picking.