Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Mercurial tips

So, I’ve switched to using Mercurial for all my version control needs. As a distributed design, it makes it easy to work on a detached machine—say on an airplane—and not lose the functionality of a full version control system. This is in stark contrast to either CVS or even Subversion, which was my previous choice. All is not perfect, of course, but I’ve learned a few tricks that weren’t obvious, at least not to me.

First, Mercurial doesn’t track directories, at least not as such. This is a big change from Subversion. This means that some of my scripts, which set up a uniform directory layout for projects and build that as the skeleton in the repository, no longer work. I fixed this relatively easily by simply putting a file names 00README in the directory which contains a one line description of what the directory is for. Overkill, but it feeds my habits.

Second, I found it a bit annoying when I needed to “push changes”: that I had to specify the location every time. Turns out, you don’t have to, as you can create aliases and you can also create defaults. If, for example, you put the following in the .../.hg/hgrc file in the repository, you just use the default all the time:

[paths]
default-push = <url></url>

Now you can just use hg push to publish your changes, and not have to do anything else. Much nicer.

Lastly, because it’s so easy to create new changesets, and takes almost zero time, I find myself checking things in much more frequently. This means that the changeset is smaller, and therefore easier to find issues should they arise.