Instant Mercurial Distributed SCM Essentials How-to

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Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Learn version control quickly using Mercurial basics and advanced features
• Set up and work with the Mercurial server for collaborative software development
• Practise a centralized workflow and continuous integration
• Customize Mercurial with advanced commands, hooks, and extensions

In Detail

A version control system provides a central repository to effectively coordinate and collaborate the work of a software development team. Mercurial is one of the most powerful and portable distributed version control systems currently available and is also fully free software. Most importantly, it provides a smooth transition for developers knowing CVS or Subversion's command set.

Instant Mercurial SCM Essentials How-to will help you in exploring the basics as well as some of Mercurial’s most advanced features, such as extensions, hooks, conflict resolution, and so on through a comprehensive set of recipes. It quickly takes you through the process of creating a simple centralized software configuration workflow and continuous integration practice. If you are a software developer already familiar to version control but new to the Mercurial open source distributed VCS, this book is a great place to start.

Instant Mercurial SCM Essentials How-to begins with taking you through the tool installation and configuration and the most standard version control tasks, either for working locally or with a team through a series of easy-to-perform practical recipes.

Furthermore, this book will help you understand several tasks related to configuration management such as branching, merging, or solving conflicts and advanced tool usage; how to set up a web interface, to find when a bug was introduced, to enforce rules, to work with patches, or to set up a bidirectional gateway to another VCS.

Using a practical format of easy-to-perform recipes, Instant Mercurial SCM Essentials How-to leverages the simplicity and power of Mercurial to help you be more efficient and productive.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and configure Mercurial, the Mercurial-server extension, and TortoiseHg
• Place local files under version control to track their changes, display history, and revert changes
• Display detailed information about repositories, search through revisions, and customize printed command outputs
• Collaborate with others, diverge using clones or branches, merge and solve conflicts, and set up ad-hock or centralized servers
• Learn Agile practices such as collective ownership or continuous integration through simple SCM practices
• Set up a web interface to the repositories, find out at what revision a bug started, select which changes to commit, work with mutable changes (patches), and convert to and from Git or other VCS
• Set up hooks to mark a repository as deprecated (read-only), enforce a single-head policy, or to check a user's identity complies with a given policy
• Undo operations, ignore local files, keep local (or remote) changes forcibly during a merge, and display version control information in your prompt