Mercurial

Mercurial
Developer(s) Matt Mackall
Initial release April 19, 2005 (2005-04-19)[1]
Stable release 2.0.2[2] / January 1, 2012; 45 days ago (2012-01-01)
Written in Python and C
Operating system Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X
Type Revision control
License GNU GPL v2
Website mercurial.selenic.com

Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is mainly implemented using the Python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in C. It is supported on Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Linux. Mercurial is primarily a command line program but graphical user interface extensions are available. All of Mercurial's operations are invoked as arguments to its driver program hg, a reference to the chemical symbol of the element mercury.

Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, decentralized, fully distributed collaborative development, robust handling of both plain text and binary files, and advanced branching and merging capabilities, while remaining conceptually simple.[3] It includes an integrated web interface. Mercurial has also taken steps to ease the transition for SVN users.

The creator and lead developer of Mercurial is Matt Mackall. Mercurial is released as free software under the terms of the GNU GPL v2.

Contents

Technical information

Mercurial uses SHA-1 hashes to identify revisions. For repository access via a network, Mercurial uses an HTTP-based protocol that seeks 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. By default it uses a 3-way merge before calling external merge tools.

History

Mackall first announced Mercurial on April 19, 2005.[1] The impetus for this was the announcement earlier that month 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. Mackall decided to write a distributed version control system as a replacement for use with the Linux kernel. This project started a few days after another project called Git, initiated by Linus Torvalds with similar aims.[4]

The Linux kernel project decided to use Git rather than Mercurial, but Mercurial is now used by many other projects (see below).

Related software

Adoption

Source code hosting

See also: Comparison of open source software hosting facilities

The following websites provide free source code hosting for Mercurial repositories:

Projects using Mercurial

Some projects using the Mercurial distributed RCS:[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Mackall, Matt (2005-04-20). "Mercurial v0.1 - a minimal scalable distributed SCM". Linux kernel mailing list. http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.2/0670.html. 
  2. ^ Mercurial 2.0.2 - [1]
  3. ^ Matt Mackall, Towards a Better SCM: Revlog and Mercurial, Ottawa Linux Symposium Proceedings, 2006.
  4. ^ Mackall, Matt (2005-04-29). "Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark". Linux kernel mailing list. http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0504.3/1404.html. 
  5. ^ "CodePlex Weblog: CodePlex now supporting native Mercurial". 2010-01-22. http://blogs.msdn.com/codeplex/archive/2010/01/22/codeplex-now-supporting-native-mercurial.aspx. 
  6. ^ "Google Code Blog: Mercurial Now Available to All Open Source Projects". 2009-05-28. http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/05/mercurial-now-available-to-all-open.html. 
  7. ^ Some projects that use Mercurial
  8. ^ "Source code repositories migrated from Subversion to Mercurial". 2010-02-27. http://www.coin3d.org/coin3d_news/source-code-repositories-migrated-from-subversion-to-mercurial. 
  9. ^ Timo Sirainen (2007-05-19). "CVS to Mercurial switch". Dovecot-news mailing list. http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2007-May/000044.html. 
  10. ^ "Open Source". 2011-07-08. http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/opensource. 
  11. ^ "Mercurial Work Flow". 2011-03-13. https://www.illumos.org/projects/illumos-gate/wiki/Mercurial_Work_Flow. 
  12. ^ Ryan C. Gordon (2010-05-11). "Lugaru goes open source!". http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=4590. 
  13. ^ J. Paul Reed (2007-04-12). "Version Control System Shootout Redux Redux". http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2007/04/version_control_system_shootou_1.html. 
  14. ^ "Switch to hg.netbeans.org completed". January 2008. http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=nbdev&msgNo=40342. 
  15. ^ "Mercurial « OGRE – Open Source 3D Graphics Engine". 2010-04-04. http://www.ogre3d.org/developers/mercurial. 
  16. ^ James Gosling (October 2006). James Gosling on Open Sourcing Sun's Java Platform Implementations, Part 1. Interview with Robert Eckstein. http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/gosling_os1_qa.html. 
  17. ^ "OpenIndiana Source Repositories". 2011-03-13. http://wiki.openindiana.org:8080/display/oi/Source+repositories. 
  18. ^ "OpenOffice.org development switches to Mercurial". 2009-10-15. http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/openoffice_org_development_switches_to. 
  19. ^ "RawTherapee". 2010-01-04. http://www.rawtherapee.com/. 
  20. ^ "Mercurial Repositories". http://hg.sagemath.org/. Retrieved 13 April 2011. 
  21. ^ David Wood (2009-04-06). "We decided in the end to use Mercurial rather than Git.". http://web.archive.org/web/20090414192645/http://blog.symbian.org/2009/04/06/collaboration-at-the-heart/#comment-789. Retrieved 2009-05-07. 
  22. ^ "Distributed VCS: On git and mercurial, a transition from SVN". http://pedro.larroy.com/blog/?p=272. 

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