Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects.
Hg: the chemical symbol for mercury, from the Greek hydrargyrum.
Mercurial: relating to or having characteristics (eloquence, swiftness, thievishness, shrewdness) attributed to the god Mercury.
Here are some key features of "Mercurial":
Fast:
· Extremely high-performance delta-compressed storage scheme
· Optimized for disk layout and access efficiency
· Complete cross-indexing of files and changesets
· Bandwidth and CPU efficient HTTP and SSH sync protocols
Scalable:
· Distributed development model supports unlimited numbers of developers
· Allows arbitrary merging between developer branches
· Doesn`t significantly degrade with large numbers of files or changesets
· No waiting for locks!
Robust:
· SHA1 integrity checking on repository data
· Append-only storage model with transaction journalling
· Fast full-repository verification
· Convenient backup
Easy to use:
· Most commands are familiar to users of CVS and other systems
· Built-in command help
· Integrated stand-alone web interface (example)
· Works with various GUI tools
Easy to adopt:
· Runs on Mac OS X, UNIX and Windows
· Conversion tools available for many popular SCMs
· Allows a variety of usage models
· Supports user-defined hooks and extensions
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· bookmarks: do not forward merged bookmark (issue1877)
· changelog: convert user and desc from local encoding early
· fix bookmarks rollback behavior
· hgrc.5: document shell aliases
· httprepo: proper handling of invalid responses without content-type (issue2019)
· httprepo: send URL redirection notices to stderr (issue2828)
· localrepo: don`t add deleted files to list of modified/added files (issue2761)
· localrepo: ignore tags to unknown nodes (issue2750)
· mq: strip extra whitespace from node ids in header (issue2790)
· rebase: restore mq guards after rebasing (issue2107)
· revset: expand help for contains predicate
· revset: note case-insensitive matches in keyword and user
· revset: note case-sensitive match in grep
· revset: report a parse error if a revset is not parsed completely (issue2654)
· revset: the name is optional for the tag predicate
· simplemerge: do not allow binary files to abort an entire merge
· strip: make it clear that --force discards changes (issue310)
· subrepo: don`t crash when git .hgsub...
