Mercurial

Also published on Mercurials Workflows wikipage. Originally written for PyHurd: Python bindings for the GNU Hurd.

For Whom?

If you

1. want to develop features collaboratively and you want to be able to see later for which feature a given change was added or
2. want to do changes concurrently which would likely affect each other negatively while they are not finished, but which need to be developed in a group with minimal overhead,

then this workflow might be right for you.

Note: If you have a huge number of small features (2000 and upwards), the number of persistent named branches can create certain performance problems. For features which need no collaboration or need only a few commits, this workflow also has much unnecessary overhead. It is best used for features which will be developed side by side with default for some time (and many commits), so tracking the default branch against the feature is relevant. To mark single-commit features as belonging to a feature, just use the commit message.

Note: The difference between Mercurial named branches and git branches is that git branches don’t stay in history. They don’t allow you to find out later in which branch a certain commit was added. If you want git-style branching, just use bookmarks.

The official workflow guide for Mercurial, mirrored from mercurial.selenic.com/guide. License: GPLv2 or later.

It delves into nonlinear history and merging right from the beginning and uses only features you get without activating extensions. Due to this it offers efficient and safe workflows without danger of losing already committed work.

• Basic workflows
• Log keeping
• Lone developer with nonlinear history
• Separate features
• Sharing changes
• Summary
• Advanced workflows
• Backing out bad revisions
• Collaborative feature development
• Tagging revisions
• Removing history
• Summary
• More complex workflows
• License

Anonymous DVCS in the Darknet.
This is a mirror of the documentation of the infocalypse extension for Mercurial written by djk - published here with his permission. It is licensed solely under the GPLv2 or later.

Introduction

The Infocalypse 2.0 hg extension is an extension for Mercurial that allows you to create, publish and maintain incrementally updateable repositories in Freenet.

Your code is then hosted decentrally and anonymously, making it just as censorship-resistant as all other content in Freenet.

It works better than the other DVCS currently available for Freenet.

Most of the information you will find in this document can also be found in the extension's online help. i.e.:

hg help infocalypse

If you want to publish your scientific scripts, as Nick Barnes advises in Nature, you can very easily do so with Mercurial.

All my stuff (not just code), excempting only huge datasets, is in a Mercurial source repository¹.

Whenever I change something and it does anything new, I commit the files with a simple commit (even if it’s only “it compiles!”).

→ comment to The next wave in scholarly word processors?

What I’d like to see is more people using version tracking systems.

With these you have a discussion which can be merged easily when it gets branched. I use it for anything I do, and I could use it together with an only-windows-and-GUI user with ease, installing TortoiseHG for both and Lyx for him (LaTeX made easy – you don’t have to see the sources).

• http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/
• http://www.lyx.org/

Why?

What I miss in the internet is the notion of being able to control what my apps access for data.

Why can’t a chat application just connect to a neighborhood- or community-server, and why can’t the activity-stream come from the people I know — and query only their systems, like jabber does?

Almost all geolocation services should be implementable over direct friend-to-friend connections like jabber, and I don’t really see why my local identi.ca program can’t also get the news from my local jabber contacts.

Downloading the Repository

After installing TortoiseHG, you can download a repository to your computer by right-clicking in a folder and selecting the menu "TortoiseHG" and then "Clone" in there (currently you still need Windows for that - all other dialogs can be evoked in GNU/Linux on the commandline via "hgtk").

Right-Click menu, Windows:

Goal

A workflow where the repository gets updated only from repositories whose heads got signed by at least a certain percentage or a certain number of trusted committers.

Requirements

Mercurial, two hooks for checking and three special files in the repo.

The hooks do all the work - apart from them, the repo is just a normal Mercurial repository. After cloning it, you only need to setup the hooks to activate the workflow.

Extensions: gpg

Hooks: prechangegroup and pretxnchangegroup

Das Repository herunterladen

Wenn du TortoiseHG installiert hast, kannst du dir das Repository auf den Rechner laden, indem du in einem Ordner rechtsklickst und im Menü "TortoiseHG" die Option "Clone" wählst (Aktuell brauchst du für den Dialog noch Windows, die anderen gibt es auch in GNU/Linux).

Rechtsklick-Menü, Windows:

Clone, GNU/Linux:

We (nelchael and me) just finished a live ebuild for Mercurial which allows to conveniently track the main (mpm) repo of Mercurial in Gentoo.

To use the ebuild, just add

=dev-util/mercurial-9999 **  

to your package.keywords and emerge mercurial (again).