Mercurial DVCS

Mercurial, or Hg is one of the new family of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) that are being pushed as the modern way of handing version control, but some areas still need work to provide the facilities that have been available for years with CVS and SVN. The latest version of Hg is now providing clean downloads of projects consisting of multiple subrepos and so the modular base of CVS conversions can now be supported. The support for this is also rippling through to the supporting tools such as TortoiseHg and MercurialEclipse, allowing either to be used to support these super-projects on Linux or Windows machines.

Current version being used is 1.9, from http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/, but selecting which one to install is a little difficult. On windows machines, there is a combined version complete with TortoiseHg and the correct version for your build of Windows. I am however still trying to tidy up configuration of this when combined with the MercurialEclipse plugin. As with many modern projects, there are several ways of passing config settings in, and in the case of Hg only some of these are properly managed by the editor tools. A very useful debug tool is provided in Hg, by running the command 'hg showconfig --debug'. This shows the active settings and identifies where these are loaded from.

Beginners Guide
Mercurial, The Definative Guide - Getting a little long in the tooth and needs some major updates to match current versions.