Mercurial (software)
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| Developed by | Matt Mackall |
|---|---|
| Latest release | 1.2.1 / 2009-3-20 |
| Written in | Python and C |
| Operating system | Unix-like, Windows, Mac OS X |
| Type | Revision control |
| License | GPL v2 |
| Website | www.selenic.com/mercurial |
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. Mercurial was initially written to run on Linux. It has been ported to Windows, Mac OS X, and most other Unix-like systems. Mercurial is primarily a command line program. All of Mercurial's operations are invoked as keyword options 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.[1] It includes an integrated web interface.
The creator and lead developer of Mercurial is Matt Mackall. The source code is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, qualifying Mercurial as free software.
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[edit] Technical information
Mercurial uses SHA-1 hashes to identify revisions. For repository access via a network, Mercurial uses 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.
[edit] Documentation
A comprehensive reference manual, Distributed revision control with Mercurial,[2] has been written by Bryan O'Sullivan. The manual is freely available under the terms of the Open Publication License.
[edit] History
Mackall first announced Mercurial on April 19, 2005.[3] The immediate stimulus 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 at approximately the same time as another project called Git, started by Linus Torvalds with similar aims.
The Linux kernel project decided to use Git rather than Mercurial, but Mercurial is now used by many other projects (see below).
[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. There is an hgk replacement named hgview that is written in pure python and provides both gtk and qt interfaces.
- Related tools for merging include (h)gct (Qt) and Meld.
- The convert extension allows import from CVS, Darcs, git, GNU Arch, Monotone, Perforce and Subversion repositories.
- Netbeans IDE supports Mercurial from Version 6.
- TortoiseHg provides a user-friendly, right-click menu interface for Windows and GNOME's Nautilus file manager.
- VisualHG is an Mercurial source control provider plugin for MS Visual Studio 2008.
- Mercurial Eclipse is an Eclipse team provider plugin for Eclipse 3.3 and newer.
[edit] Projects using Mercurial
Some projects using the Mercurial distributed RCS:[4]
- Major projects
- Python programming language[5]
- Mozilla[6]
- OpenJDK[7]
- OpenSolaris[8]
- The Xen hypervisor[9]
- Others
- Adblock Plus
- Aldrin
- Audacious
- Dovecot IMAP server[10]
- GNU Octave
- NxOS
- Nuxeo
- Growl
- MoinMoin wiki software
- Mutt (email client)
- Netbeans[11]
- SAGE
- LinuxTV/Video4Linux
- Oracle's Opensource Software like Btrfs[12]
[edit] See also
- Distributed revision control
- List of revision control software
- Comparison of revision control software
[edit] References
- ^ Matt Mackall, Towards a Better SCM: Revlog and Mercurial, Ottawa Linux Symposium Proceedings, 2006.
- ^ Bryan O'Sullivan (2007-01-01). Distributed revision control with Mercurial. http://hgbook.red-bean.com/.
- ^ Matt Mackall (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.
- ^ Some projects that use Mercurial
- ^ Guido van Rossum (2009-03-30). "And the winner is...". Python-Dev mailing list. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/087931.html.
- ^ 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.
- ^ James Gosling. Interview with Robert Eckstein. James Gosling on Open Sourcing Sun's Java Platform Implementations, Part 1. October 2006.
- ^ "OpenSolaris SCM Project History". 2006-10-05. http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/scm/history/.
- ^ Ian Pratt (2005-07-01). "mercurial now live". Xen-devel mailing list. http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2005-07/msg00003.html.
- ^ Timo Sirainen (2007-05-19). "CVS to Mercurial switch". Dovecot-news mailing list. http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2007-May/000044.html.
- ^ "Switch to hg.netbeans.org completed". January 2008. http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=nbdev&msgNo=40342.
- ^ "Oracle Opensource Software Repositories". 2008-08-25. http://oss.oracle.com/mercurial.
