jmoiron.net

This past week/end, I set up Mercurial on my server and started a few projects there. One is called slipcover, which I talked about last time. The other project, which I've started more recently, isn't really called anything. It was started as a direct result of me using Hg and I must say that so far I am pretty happy.

That project is called Beaker and it already has a perfectly nice home. Beaker is a session management library for Python that allows a number of different storage backends: memcached, database (via sqlalchemy), memory, files, etc. My project is a branch that has a CouchDB backend extension for Beaker.

In Hg, the "checkout" operation actually creates a branch that is no different in terms of operation from upstream: you can checkout from it, checkin new revisions, etc. If you are more interested about how Hg being distributed helps make this type of operation simple, and are coming from a centralized versioning system background (as I was), I highly recommend you read Armin Ronacher's "Mercurial for SVN Users", which does the job of explaining the philosophy of Hg to people used to svn/cvs admirably and better than I could without lots of effort.

Hg is as of just last month "1.0" software, and has already proven itself in major projects like Java. There is a fairly mature trac plugin and various rcs conversion tools. Although there is no WebDAV support, hgwebserve supports most of the same uses with respects to checking in/out via https, and comes with a revision browsing interface that includes colorized diffs and various changelog views. In the coming weeks, I'll be migrating my old svn repositories to Hg and migrating my trac instances to use TracMercurial.