Mercurial - Distributed Revision Control
Posted by Richard Mon, Sep 03 2007 22:17
Recently, I have tried several other version control systems to see what they were like as opposed to the normal one. After trying these, I have come to like Mercurial (or "hg" from the command line). It is a distributed revision control application. Why would I be interested especially when there is subversion? Let's take a quick look.
I have a scripts directory that is in "~/.bin". I wanted to version all the files in that directory and back them up somewhere. Here is what I did:
$ cd ~/.bin $ hg init # initialize the repository $ hg add . # add all of the files in the current directory $ hg commit # commit the file to hg
Now if I change any file, I can run hg status or hg diff with similar results as svn. Once I am done, I just run hg commit to update the local repository.
What about backing up the files?
$ hg push ssh://someothercomputer.cam/backup_bin # push the repository to a server
Pretty easy. No svn import and then checkout. Visit the site or read the book to see the other powerful features.
