Mercurial

Mercurial
Developer(s) Matt Mackall
Initial release 19 April 2005 (2005-04-19)[1]
Stable release
4.7.2[2] / 1 October 2018 (2018-10-01)
Repository
Edit this at Wikidata
Written in Python and C
Operating system Unix-like, Windows, macOS
Type Version control
License GNU GPL v2+
Website www.mercurial-scm.org

Mercurial is a distributed revision-control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS and Linux.

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 users of other version control systems, particularly Subversion. Mercurial is primarily a command-line driven program, but graphical user interface extensions are available, e.g. TortoiseHg, and several IDEs offer support for version control with Mercurial. All of Mercurial's operations are invoked as arguments to its driver program hg (a reference to Hg - the chemical symbol of the element mercury).

Matt Mackall originated Mercurial and has served as its lead developer until late 2016. Mercurial is released as free software under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 (or any later version[4]). It is mainly implemented using the Python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in C.

History

Mackall first announced Mercurial on 19 April 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 the now well-known Git project was initiated by Linus Torvalds with similar aims.[5]

The Linux kernel project decided to use Git rather than Mercurial, but Mercurial is now used by many other projects (see below). "Git vs. Mercurial" has become one of the holy wars of hacker culture.[6]

In an answer on the Mercurial mailing list, Matt Mackall explained how the name "Mercurial" was chosen:

In 2013, Facebook adopted Mercurial and began work on scaling it to handle their large, unified code repository.[9]

Design

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.

Usage

Figure 1 shows some of the most important operations in Mercurial and their relations to Mercurial's concepts.

Figure 1: Some important operations of Mercurial and their relations.

Adoption

Although Mercurial was not selected to manage the Linux kernel sources, it has been adopted by several organizations, including Facebook,[10] the W3C, and Mozilla. Facebook is using the Rust programming language to write Mononoke[11][12], a Mercurial server specifically designed to support large multi-project repositories.

Mercurial servers and repository management

Source code hosting

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

Open source projects using Mercurial

Some projects using the Mercurial distributed RCS:[19]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Mackall, Matt (2005-04-20). "Mercurial v0.1 – a minimal scalable distributed SCM". Linux kernel (Mailing list).
  2. ↑ "What's new", Mercurial (wiki) (4.7.2 ed.), mercurial-scm.org .
  3. ↑ Mackall, Matthew ‘Matt’ (2006), "Towards a Better SCM: Revlog and Mercurial" (PDF), Linux Symposium Proceedings (PDF)|format= requires |url= (help), Ottawa: Mercurial-scm.org .
  4. ↑ "Relicensing", Mercurial (wiki), Mercurial-scm.org .
  5. ↑ Mackall, Matt (29 April 2005). "Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark". Linux kernel (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 9 July 2012.
  6. ↑ "Managing source code with Mercurial". Mercurial and Git fans are also happy to discuss the learning curve, merits, and usability of each VCS system's command set. Space prevents that discussion here, but a web search on that topic will provide lots of interesting reading material.
  7. ↑ Mackall, Matt (2012-02-15). "Why did Matt choose the name Mercurial?". Mercurial (Mailing list). Retrieved 7 June 2016.
  8. ↑ Torvalds has said: "I'm an egotistical bastard, so I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git."
  9. ↑ Goode, Durham; Agarwal, Siddharth. "Scaling Mercurial at Facebook". Facebook Code. Facebook. Retrieved 13 October 2015.
  10. ↑ "Scaling Mercurial at Facebook".
  11. ↑ "A Mercurial source control server, specifically designed to support large monorepos".
  12. ↑ "Mercurial 4.0 Sprint Notes".
  13. ↑ "Git, Mercurial & Subversion hosting". Features. Codebase HQ. 2013-03-04.
  14. ↑ https://ps.gnu.org.ua/
  15. ↑ https://osdn.net/hg/
  16. ↑ http://info.perforce.com/try-perforce-helix-teamhub-free
  17. ↑ https://www.tuxfamily.org/en/about
  18. ↑ "Hosting", Mercurial (wiki), Mercurial-scm.org .
  19. ↑ "Some projects that use Mercurial", Mercurial (wiki), Mercurial-scm.org .
  20. ↑ "Source", Adblock+ .
  21. ↑ "Source code repositories migrated from Subversion to Mercurial". Coin3D (news). 2010-02-27.
  22. ↑ "Mercurial Work Flow" (wiki). Illumos. 2011-03-13.
  23. ↑ Reed, J Paul (2007-04-12). "Version Control System Shootout Redux Redux".
  24. ↑ "Switch to hg.netbeans.org completed". Net beans. January 2008.
  25. ↑ "Mercurial". Developers. OGRE – Open Source 3D Graphics Engine. 4 April 2010. Archived from the original on 2 January 2011.
  26. ↑ James Gosling (October 2006). "Open Sourcing Sun's Java Platform Implementations, Part 1" (Interview). Interviewed by Robert Eckstein. Sun. Archived from the original on 1 March 2009.
  • Official website Edit this at Wikidata
  • O'Sullivan, Bryan (2009), Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (book), O'Reilly , freely available online
  • "Mercurial: an alternative to git", LWN
  • An example-based Mercurial tutorial (PDF), SE: Jemander covering both basic and advanced use
  • "Mercurial", TechTalk (video)|format= requires |url= (help), Google
  • "Subversion or CVS, Bazaar or Mercurial? Four open source version control systems compared", Java World, Sep 2007
  • Spolsky, Joel, Mercurial tutorial
  • Mackall, Matt, "FLOSS Podcast", This week in Tech
  • List of projects using Mercurial from the Mercurial wiki

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