Pete Vidler - Software development and technology in general

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Bite-Sized Mercurial.

For a while now I have been trying to get to grips with some of the newer version control systems, with a view to learning Mercurial in particular. There are several truly superb introductory articles covering the basics of Mercurial, but I have found them all either too large to digest in one sitting or too lacking in details of daily Mercurial usage. This is a series of short articles about learning the basics of Mercurial from the perspective of one particular workflow. I’ll start with a basic overview of Mercurial for those who are already familiar with Subversion.

Continue reading Introduction to Bite-Sized Mercurial →

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Bite-Sized Mercurial.

As I discussed previously there are many possible workflows to use with Mercurial; I will only be looking at some very specific scenarios. For example, it’s often the case that we want to separate work being done on cutting edge development from bug-fixes that get applied to the latest stable release. This is often done with branching — you have a main development branch and a separate branch for every significant release.

As with everything else, there are many ways to branch in Mercurial. I’ll start in this article by looking specifically at the use of named branches.

Continue reading Release Management in Mercurial →

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Bite-Sized Mercurial.

As a distributed version control system, Mercurial allows us to push and pull changes between any two repositories in an ad hoc manner. In reality, most projects can benefit from a central server (even if it’s just a repository on the lead developer’s machine) — somewhere accessible to keep an authoritative copy of the project.

In this article, I’ll look at one way to work with a remote central repository in order to share code with other developers.

Continue reading Central Repositories in Mercurial →