Mercurial (software)

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Mercurial

Developer:	Matt Mackall
Latest release:	0.9.3 / December 17, 2006
OS:	Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X
Use:	Revision control
License:	GPL
Website:	Mercurial Wiki

Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed source management tool for software developers.

It is written in Python, with a binary diff implementation written in C. Mercurial is primarily a command line program. All its commands begin with hg, a reference to the chemical symbol for Mercury.

Its major features include high performance; serverless, fully distributed collaborative development; robust handling of both plain text and binary files; and advanced branching and merging capabilities. It includes an integrated web interface.

The creator and lead developer of Mercurial is Matt Mackall. The full source code is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

1 Technical information
2 History
3 Related software
4 Users
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Technical information

Like Git and Monotone, Mercurial uses SHA-1 hashes to identify revisions.

Mercurial uses an efficient, HTTP-based networking protocol that works to reduce round-trip requests, new connections and data transferred. Mercurial can also work over ssh where the protocol is very similar to the HTTP based protocol.

It has been ported to Windows, Mac OS X, and most Unix-like systems.

[edit] History

Mackall first announced Mercurial on April 19, 2005. [1]

The immediate stimulus for this was the April announcement by Bitmover that they were withdrawing the free version of BitKeeper. BitKeeper had been used for the version control requirements of the Linux kernel project till then, but since it could not be so any longer, Mackall decided to write a replacement distributed version control system for use on the Linux kernel. This project started at approximately the same time as another project called Git, started by Linus Torvalds with similar aims.

The most recent version is 0.9.3, released on December 17, 2006.

[edit] Related software

GUI interfaces for Mercurial include Hgk (Tcl/Tk). This is implemented as a Mercurial extension, and is part of the official version. This viewer displays the directed acyclic graph of the changesets of a Mercurial repository. This viewer can be invoked via the command 'hg view', if the extension is enabled. hgk was originally based on a similar tool for git called gitk.