Mercurial: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide

by Bryan O'Sullivan

Overview

This instructive book takes you step by step through ways to track, merge, and manage both open source and commercial software projects with Mercurial, using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and other systems. Mercurial is the easiest system to learn when it comes to distributed revision control. And it's a very flexible tool that's ideal whether you're a lone programmer working on a small project, or part of a huge team dealing with thousands of files.

Mercurial permits a countless variety of development and collaboration methods, and this book offers several concrete suggestions to get you started. This guide will help you:

• Learn the basics of working with a repository, changesets, and revisions
• Merge changes from separate repositories
• Set up Mercurial to work with files on a daily basis, including which ones to track
• Get examples and tools for setting up various workflow models
• Manage a project that's making progress on multiple fronts at once
• Find and fix mistakes by isolating problem sources
• Use hooks to perform actions automatically in response to repository events
• Customize the output of Mercurial

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide maintains a strong focus on simplicity to help you learn Mercurial quickly and thoroughly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596555474
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/16/2009
Series:	Animal Guide
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	284
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Bryan O'Sullivan is an Irish writer and developer who works with distributed systems, open source software, and programming languages. He wrote the award-winning O'Reilly title Real World Haskell. He has made significant contributions to the popular Mercurial revision control system, and to a number of other open source projects. He lives in San Francisco with his family. Whenever he can, he runs off to climb rocks.

Table of Contents

Preface; Technical Storytelling; Thank You for Supporting Mercurial; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; This Book Is Free; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: A Brief History of Revision Control; 1.1 Why Revision Control? Why Mercurial?; 1.2 This Book Is a Work in Progress; 1.3 About the Examples in This Book; 1.4 Trends in the Field; 1.5 A Few Advantages of Distributed Revision Control; 1.6 Why Choose Mercurial?; 1.7 Mercurial Compared with Other Tools; 1.8 Switching from Another Tool to Mercurial; 1.9 A Short History of Revision Control; Chapter 2: A Tour of Mercurial: The Basics; 2.1 Installing Mercurial on Your System; 2.2 Getting Started; 2.3 Working with a Repository; 2.4 A Tour Through History; 2.5 All About Command Options; 2.6 Making and Reviewing Changes; 2.7 Recording Changes in a New Changeset; 2.8 Sharing Changes; 2.9 Starting a New Project; Chapter 3: A Tour of Mercurial: Merging Work; 3.1 Merging Streams of Work; 3.2 Merging Conflicting Changes; 3.3 Simplifying the Pull-Merge-Commit Sequence; 3.4 Renaming, Copying, and Merging; Chapter 4: Behind the Scenes; 4.1 Mercurial’s Historical Record; 4.2 Safe, Efficient Storage; 4.3 Revision History, Branching, and Merging; 4.4 The Working Directory; 4.5 Other Interesting Design Features; Chapter 5: Mercurial in Daily Use; 5.1 Telling Mercurial Which Files to Track; 5.2 How to Stop Tracking a File; 5.3 Copying Files; 5.4 Renaming Files; 5.5 Recovering from Mistakes; 5.6 Dealing with Tricky Merges; 5.7 More Useful Diffs; 5.8 Which Files to Manage, and Which to Avoid; 5.9 Backups and Mirroring; Chapter 6: Collaborating with Other People; 6.1 Mercurial’s Web Interface; 6.2 Collaboration Models; 6.3 The Technical Side of Sharing; 6.4 Informal Sharing with hg serve; 6.5 Using the Secure Shell Protocol; 6.6 Serving Over HTTP Using CGI; 6.7 System-Wide Configuration; Chapter 7: Filenames and Pattern Matching; 7.1 Simple File Naming; 7.2 Running Commands Without Any Filenames; 7.3 Telling You What’s Going On; 7.4 Using Patterns to Identify Files; 7.5 Filtering Files; 7.6 Permanently Ignoring Unwanted Files and Directories; 7.7 Case Sensitivity; Chapter 8: Managing Releases and Branchy Development; 8.1 Giving a Persistent Name to a Revision; 8.2 The Flow of Changes: Big Picture Versus Little Picture; 8.3 Managing Big-Picture Branches in Repositories; 8.4 Don’t Repeat Yourself: Merging Across Branches; 8.5 Naming Branches Within One Repository; 8.6 Dealing with Multiple Named Branches in a Repository; 8.7 Branch Names and Merging; 8.8 Branch Naming Is Generally Useful; Chapter 9: Finding and Fixing Mistakes; 9.1 Erasing Local History; 9.2 Reverting the Mistaken Change; 9.3 Dealing with Committed Changes; 9.4 Changes That Should Never Have Been; 9.5 Finding the Source of a Bug; 9.6 Tips for Finding Bugs Effectively; Chapter 10: Handling Repository Events with Hooks; 10.1 An Overview of Hooks in Mercurial; 10.2 Hooks and Security; 10.3 A Short Tutorial on Using Hooks; 10.4 Writing Your Own Hooks; 10.5 Some Hook Examples; 10.6 Bundled Hooks; 10.7 Information for Writers of Hooks; 10.8 Hook Reference; Chapter 11: Customizing the Output of Mercurial; 11.1 Using Precanned Output Styles; 11.2 Commands That Support Styles and Templates; 11.3 The Basics of Templating; 11.4 Common Template Keywords; 11.5 Escape Sequences; 11.6 Filtering Keywords to Change Their Results; 11.7 From Templates to Styles; 11.8 Style Files by Example; Chapter 12: Managing Changes with Mercurial Queues; 12.1 The Patch Management Problem; 12.2 The Prehistory of Mercurial Queues; 12.3 The Huge Advantage of MQ; 12.4 Understanding Patches; 12.5 Getting Started with Mercurial Queues; 12.6 More About Patches; 12.7 More on Patch Management; 12.8 Getting the Best Performance Out of MQ; 12.9 Updating Your Patches When the Underlying Code Changes; 12.10 Identifying Patches; 12.11 Useful Things to Know About; 12.12 Managing Patches in a Repository; 12.13 Third-Party Tools for Working with Patches; 12.14 Good Ways to Work with Patches; 12.15 MQ Cookbook; 12.16 Differences Between Quilt and MQ; Chapter 13: Advanced Uses of Mercurial Queues; 13.1 The Problem of Many Targets; 13.2 Conditionally Applying Patches with Guards; 13.3 Controlling the Guards on a Patch; 13.4 Selecting the Guards to Use; 13.5 MQ’s Rules for Applying Patches; 13.6 Trimming the Work Environment; 13.7 Dividing Up the Series File; 13.8 Maintaining the Patch Series; 13.9 Useful Tips for Developing with MQ; Chapter 14: Adding Functionality with Extensions; 14.1 Improve Performance with the inotify Extension; 14.2 Flexible Diff Support with the extdiff Extension; 14.3 Cherry-Picking Changes with the transplant Extension; 14.4 Sending Changes via Email with the ppppppatchbomb Extension; Migrating to Mercurial; Importing History from Another System; Migrating from Subversion; Useful Tips for Newcomers; Mercurial Queues Reference; MQ Command Reference; MQ File Reference; Installing Mercurial from Source; On a Unix-Like System; On Windows; Open Publication License; Requirements on Both Unmodified and Modified Versions; Copyright; Scope of License; Requirements on Modified Works; Good-Practice Recommendations; License Options; Colophon;

Bryan O'Sullivan is an Irish writer and developer who works with distributed systems, open source software, and programming languages. He wrote the award-winning O'Reilly title Real World Haskell. He has made significant contributions to the popular Mercurial revision control system, and to a number of other open source projects. He lives in San Francisco with his family. Whenever he can, he runs off to climb rocks.