Mercurial For Mac

Mercurial is a source control management tool that can help software developers to manipulate the revisions of their projects in an efficient manner. The system allows you to work on existing projects, by grabbing a copy from the repository, or you can start your own from scratch.

For your convenience, Mercurial comes with an installer package that quickly deploys the  revision control system on your computer. Note that Mercurial depends on your Python installation, and that you will be able to control the utility only via the command line.

To get started, you must define a Mercurial username which will be used when you submit commits to other projects. The next step is to grab a copy from a browsable repository, and make your own changes.

The Mercurial project repositories store a complete history of the software project, but the system is not limited to a single copy: the way in which the data is managed encourages the parallel development of the same project.

To start making changes, you need a working directory, which also contains a copy of the complete project history: this way, you will have a private copy of the project all to yourself. Mercurial provides support for basic revision management functionalities: you can commit changesets, clone repositories, merge or pull changesets to synchronize two branches of the same project.

Thanks to its decentralized nature, the Mercurial software revision control tool can prove to be extremely useful when you want to test certain features, while not loosing the original project files: each working directory has the complete history of the project. You can merge and pull changesets in order to incorporate various adjustments into the same revision.