Mercurial

Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed version control system for software development. It is almost completely developed in Python: only a diff implementation that can handle binary files is implemented in C. Mercurial is primarily used on the command line; All commands start with " hg", the element symbol of mercury ( engl. Mercury ).

Development priorities of Mercurial are efficiency, scalability, and robust handling of text and binary files. While version control systems with a central server ( such as CVS or SVN ) Third usually only have read access to the repository, the repository of the project in which you want to develop, " cloned" in Mercurial, so creates a local copy. At this local copy then the usual features are available, for example, referred to the creation of new revisions, Change Set.

The ability to create and merge branches of development (English: " branching " and " merging" ), is an integral part of Mercurial. An integrated web interface is not available; Third-party provide graphical front ends or plugins for development environments.

History

On 19 April 2005 Mercurial was announced by Matt Mackall on the Linux kernel mailing list. The decisive factor was the announcement of the company BitMover, no longer provide the software, for example, used for the Linux kernel as a version control system, BitKeeper in a free version. At about the same time Linus Torvalds had begun to start his own project called Git, which has similar aims as Mercurial.

Officially Git is used for the Linux kernel, but there are also kernel developers using Mercurial.

Dissemination

Mercurial is used by many well-known software projects and companies. Among other things, it is used in Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird), SourceForge, Google Inc. (Google Chrome, Google Code ), Microsoft ( CodePlex ), Oracle ( OpenJDK ), Xen, NetBeans IDE, Python and Clear Canvas.

Graphical frontends

For Microsoft Windows and Gnome / Nautilus is the graphical install TortoiseHg, and Mac OS X with MacHg and Murky, each one easy to use frontend is available that allows you to use Mercurial without any command line commands.

Several integrated development environments such as Netbeans, Eclipse or Qt Creator support Mercurial directly from the user interface, usually through a plugin which is either supplied or installed subsequently. MercurialEclipse will also allow working with Patch Queues (mq).