Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide takes you step-by-step through ways to track, merge, and manage software projects with this flexible, open source version control system. Used by Mozilla, Python, and various open source projects on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and several variants of Unix, Mercurial permits virtually an infinite variety of methods for development and collaboration, including both centralized and distributed version control.



This guide starts with the basics, including how to work with a version repository. You ll learn to use Mercurial to collaborate with others, merge streams of work, manage releases, find and fix mistakes, and more. You ll also get up to speed on advanced uses, such as handling repository events with hooks, and customizing Mercurial s output.



Like the versioning system it describes, Mercurial: The Definitive Guide has a strong focus on simplicity to help you learn Mercurial quickly and thoroughly.

From the contents:

Chapter 1 A Brief History of Revision Control

Why Revision Control? Why Mercurial?

This Book Is a Work in Progress

About the Examples in This Book

Trends in the Field

A Few Advantages of Distributed Revision Control

Why Choose Mercurial?

Mercurial Compared with Other Tools

Switching from Another Tool to Mercurial

A Short History of Revision Control

Chapter 2 A Tour of Mercurial: The Basics

Installing Mercurial on Your System

Getting Started

Working with a Repository

A Tour Through History

All About Command Options

Making and Reviewing Changes

Recording Changes in a New Changeset

Sharing Changes

Starting a New Project

Chapter 3 A Tour of Mercurial: Merging Work

Merging Streams of Work

Merging Conflicting Changes

Simplifying the Pull-Merge-Commit Sequence

Renaming, Copying, and Merging

Chapter 4 Behind the Scenes

Mercurial s Historical Record

Safe, Efficient Storage

Revision History, Branching, and Merging

The Working Directory

Other Interesting Design Features

Chapter 5 Mercurial in Daily Use

Telling Mercurial Which Files to Track

How to Stop Tracking a File

Copying Files

Renaming Files

Recovering from Mistakes

Dealing with Tricky Merges

More Useful Diffs

Which Files to Manage, and Which to Avoid

Backups and Mirroring

Chapter 6 Collaborating with Other People

Mercurial s Web Interface

Collaboration Models

The Technical Side of Sharing

Informal Sharing with hg serve

Using the Secure Shell Protocol

Serving Over HTTP Using CGI

System-Wide Configuration

Chapter 7 Filenames and Pattern Matching

Simple File Naming

Running Commands Without Any Filenames

Telling You What s Going On

Using Patterns to Identify Files

Filtering Files

Permanently Ignoring Unwanted Files and Directories

Case Sensitivity

Chapter 8 Managing Releases and Branchy Development

Giving a Persistent Name to a Revision

The Flow of Changes: Big Picture Versus Little Picture

Managing Big-Picture Branches in Repositories

Don t Repeat Yourself: Merging Across Branches

Naming Branches Within One Repository

Dealing with Multiple Named Branches in a Repository

Branch Names and Merging

Branch Naming Is Generally Useful

Chapter 9 Finding and Fixing Mistakes

Erasing Local History

Reverting the Mistaken Change

Dealing with Committed Changes

Changes That Should Never Have Been

Finding the Source of a Bug

Tips for Finding Bugs Effectively

Chapter 10 Handling Repository Events with Hooks

An Overview of Hooks in Mercurial

Hooks and Security

A Short Tutorial on Using Hooks

Writing Your Own Hooks

Some Hook Examples

Bundled Hooks

Information for Writers of Hooks

Hook Reference

Chapter 11 ...