- Mercurial
-
This article is about the revision control software. For the metallic element after which it is named, see Mercury (element). For the unrelated corporation, see Mercurial Communications.
Mercurial 
Developer(s) Matt Mackall Initial release April 19, 2005[1] Stable release 2.0[2] / November 1, 2011 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
Screenshot of hgk in action
- 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. There is an hgk replacement named hgview that is written in pure python and provides both gtk and qt interfaces. - TortoiseHg
- TortoiseHg is a shell extension and a series of applications for the Mercurial distributed revision control system. It is available for Windows Explorer and GNOME Nautilus.
- Murky
- A Mac OS X GUI in Objective-C 2.0, runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and later.
- MacMercurial
- A Mac OS X GUI '"not intended to completely replace command line use of Mercurial, only to ease the most common Mercurial operations," for Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
- MacHg
- MacHg is a free and fast multithreaded front end for Mac OS X 10.6 and later.
- SourceTree
- A commercial Mac OS X GUI client that works with both Mercurial and Git.
- Related tools for merging include (h)gct (Qt) and Meld.
- The convert extension allows import from CVS, Darcs, Git, GNU Arch, Monotone, Perforce, Bazaar and Subversion repositories.
- Microsoft Visual Studio supports Mercurial with the VisualHG and HgSccPackage plugins.
- NetBeans supports Mercurial from Version 6.
- Eclipse supports Mercurial with the MercurialEclipse plugin.
Adoption
Source code hosting
The following websites provide free source code hosting for Mercurial repositories:
- Bitbucket
- CodePlex[5]
- Google Code[6]
- JavaForge by Intland Software (with pull requests to control source code contribution)
- Project Kenai by Oracle
- SourceForge
- Assembla
- GNU Savannah
- Alioth by Debian
- BerliOS
- Kiln by Fog Creek Software
- Others listed in the Mercurial wiki
Projects using Mercurial
Some projects using the Mercurial distributed RCS:[7]
- Adium
- Audacious
- Coin3D[8]
- CubicWeb
- Dovecot IMAP server[9]
- Dreamwidth blogging platform[10]
- GeeXboX
- GNU Multi-Precision Library
- GNU Octave
- Go programming language
- Growl
- Illumos[11]
- LEMON
- LinuxTV/Video4Linux
- Lugaru HD[12]
- LuxRender 3D Render Engine
- Mercurial
- MoinMoin wiki software
- Mozilla[13]
- Mutt
- Netbeans[14]
- Nuxeo
- Ogre3D[15]
- OpenJDK[16]
- OpenIndiana[17]
- OpenOffice.org[18]
- OSSEC
- PETSc
- Python (programming language)
- RabbitMQ
- RawTherapee[19]
- Sage[20]
- Symbian OS[21]
- Nokia_Maps[22]
See also
- Distributed revision control
- List of revision control software
- Comparison of revision control software
References
- ^ 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.
- ^ Mercurial 2.0 - [1]
- ^ Matt Mackall, Towards a Better SCM: Revlog and Mercurial, Ottawa Linux Symposium Proceedings, 2006.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "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.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Some projects that use Mercurial
- ^ "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.
- ^ Timo Sirainen (2007-05-19). "CVS to Mercurial switch". Dovecot-news mailing list. http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2007-May/000044.html.
- ^ "Open Source". 2011-07-08. http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/opensource.
- ^ "Mercurial Work Flow". 2011-03-13. https://www.illumos.org/projects/illumos-gate/wiki/Mercurial_Work_Flow.
- ^ Ryan C. Gordon (2010-05-11). "Lugaru goes open source!". http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=4590.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Switch to hg.netbeans.org completed". January 2008. http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=nbdev&msgNo=40342.
- ^ "Mercurial « OGRE – Open Source 3D Graphics Engine". 2010-04-04. http://www.ogre3d.org/developers/mercurial.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "OpenIndiana Source Repositories". 2011-03-13. http://wiki.openindiana.org:8080/display/oi/Source+repositories.
- ^ "OpenOffice.org development switches to Mercurial". 2009-10-15. http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/openoffice_org_development_switches_to.
- ^ "RawTherapee". 2010-01-04. http://www.rawtherapee.com/.
- ^ "Mercurial Repositories". http://hg.sagemath.org/. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Distributed VCS: On git and mercurial, a transition from SVN". http://pedro.larroy.com/blog/?p=272.
External links
- Official website
- Unofficial Mercurial Home Page
- Mercurial: The Definitive Guide a book by Bryan O'Sullivan published in 2009 by O'Reilly and freely available online
- Mercurial: an alternative to git from LWN.net
- An example-based Mercurial tutorial covering both basic and advanced use
- Mercurial for TeamWare users
- Google TechTalk on Mercurial
- Subversion or CVS, Bazaar or Mercurial? Four open source version control systems compared
- HgEclipse is an open source plugin that supports Mercurial within the Eclipse IDE.
- Joel Spolsky's Mercurial tutorial
- FLOSS Podcast featuring project lead Matt Mackall
Revision control software Years, where available, indicate the date of first stable release. Systems with names in italics are no longer maintained or have planned end-of-life dates.Local only - PVCS (1985)
Client-server Free/open-source- CVS (1990)
- CVSNT (1998)
- Subversion (2004)
Proprietary- Software Change Manager (1970s)
- ClearCase (1992)
- CMVC (1994)
- Visual SourceSafe (1994)
- Perforce (1995)
- StarTeam (1995)
- MKS Integrity (2001)
- AccuRev SCM (2002)
- SourceAnywhere (2003)
- Vault (2003)
- Team Foundation Server (2005)
- Rational Team Concert (2008)
Distributed Free/open-sourceProprietary- TeamWare (1990s?)
- Code Co-op (1997)
- BitKeeper (1998)
- Plastic SCM (2006)
Concepts - Category
- Comparison
- List
Categories:- Free revision control software
- Free software programmed in C
- Free software programmed in Python
- Distributed revision control systems
- Free cross-platform software
- 2005 software
- GUI interfaces for Mercurial include:
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
