What is "mercurial"

The Mercurial is a cross-platform tool for Version Control Distributed (Distributed Version Control Systems - DVCS) for software developers.

The system is mainly implemented in python, however the binary diff utility was written in C. Mercurial was initially written to run on Linux, but was ported to Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris 11 Express, and most other UNIX systems. Mercurial is primarily a command-line program. All Mercurial operations are called via option keywords for the Hg controller program, a reference to the chemical symbol of the Mercury element.

The main objectives in the development of Mercurial include high performance and scalability, decentralization, distributed collaborative development, robust textual and binary file control, and advanced branch (branch) and merge (merges) operations. Mercurial also includes an integrated system for viewing repositories via the web and facilitating the transition of Subversion users.

Windows users are likely to use the Tortoisehg. It integrates Mercurial directly into your system with graphical interface, which makes it easy to use.

The creator and lead developer of Mercurial is Matt Mackall. Mercurial is made available as Free Software under the GNU GPL v2 license and onward versions.