Certified Mercurial Version Control Professional

A Brief History of Revision Control

• Why Revision Control? Why Mercurial?
• This Book Is a Work in Progress
• About the Examples in This Book
• Trends in the Field
• A Few Advantages of Distributed Revision Control
• Why Choose Mercurial?
• Mercurial Compared with Other Tools
• Switching from another Tool to Mercurial
• A Short History of Revision Control

A Tour of Mercurial: The Basics

• Installing Mercurial on Your System
• Getting Started
• Working with a Repository
• A Tour through History
• All about Command Options
• Making and Reviewing Changes
• Recording Changes in a New Changeset
• Sharing Changes
• Starting a New Project

A Tour of Mercurial: Merging Work

• Merging Streams of Work
• Merging Conflicting Changes
• Simplifying the Pull-Merge-Commit Sequence
• Renaming, Copying, and Merging

Behind the Scenes

• Mercurial’s Historical Record
• Safe, Efficient Storage
• Revision History, Branching, and Merging
• The Working Directory
• Other Interesting Design Features

Mercurial in Daily Use

• Telling Mercurial Which Files to Track
• How to Stop Tracking a File
• Copying Files
• Renaming Files
• Recovering from Mistakes
• Dealing with Tricky Merges
• More Useful Diffs
• Which Files to Manage, and Which to Avoid
• Backups and Mirroring

Collaborating with Other People

• Mercurial’s Web Interface
• Collaboration Models
• The Technical Side of Sharing
• Informal Sharing with hg serve
• Using the Secure Shell Protocol
• Serving Over HTTP Using CGI
• System-Wide Configuration

Filenames and Pattern Matching

• Simple File Naming
• Running Commands without Any Filenames
• Telling You What’s Going On
• Using Patterns to Identify Files
• Filtering Files
• Permanently Ignoring Unwanted Files and Directories
• Case Sensitivity

Managing Releases and Branchy Development

• Giving a Persistent Name to a Revision
• The Flow of Changes: Big Picture versus Little Picture
• Managing Big-Picture Branches in Repositories
• Don’t Repeat Yourself: Merging Across Branches
• Naming Branches within One Repository
• Dealing with Multiple Named Branches in a Repository
• Branch Names and Merging
• Branch Naming Is Generally Useful

Finding and Fixing Mistakes

• Erasing Local History
• Reverting the Mistaken Change
• Dealing with Committed Changes
• Changes That Should Never Have Been
• Finding the Source of a Bug
• Tips for Finding Bugs Effectively

Handling Repository Events with Hooks

• An Overview of Hooks in Mercurial
• Hooks and Security
• A Short Tutorial on Using Hooks
• Writing Your Own Hooks
• Some Hook Examples
• Bundled Hooks
• Information for Writers of Hooks
• Hook Reference

Customizing the Output of Mercurial

• Using Precanned Output Styles
• Commands That Support Styles and Templates
• The Basics of Templating
• Common Template Keywords
• Escape Sequences
• Filtering Keywords to Change Their Results
• From Templates to Styles
• Style Files by Example

Managing Changes with Mercurial Queues

• The Patch Management Problem
• The Prehistory of Mercurial Queues
• The Huge Advantage of MQ
• Understanding Patches
• Getting Started with Mercurial Queues
• More about Patches
• More on Patch Management
• Getting the Best Performance Out of MQ
• Updating Your Patches When the Underlying Code Changes
• Identifying Patches
• Useful Things to Know About
• Managing Patches in a Repository
• Third-Party Tools for Working with Patches
• Good Ways to Work with Patches
• MQ Cookbook
• Differences between Quilt and MQ

Advanced Uses of Mercurial Queues

• The Problem of Many Targets
• Conditionally Applying Patches with Guards
• Controlling the Guards on a Patch
• Selecting the Guards to Us
• MQ’s Rules for Applying Patches
• Trimming the Work Environment
• Dividing Up the Series File
• Maintaining the Patch Series
• Useful Tips for Developing with MQ

Adding Functionality with Extensions

• Improve Performance with the inotify Extension
• Flexible Diff Support with the extdiff Extension
• Cherry-Picking Changes with the transplant Extension
• Sending Changes via Email with the patchbomb Extension

Migrating to Mercurial

• Importing History from another System
• Migrating from Subversion
• Useful Tips for Newcomers
• Appendix Mercurial Queues Reference
• MQ Command Reference
• MQ File Reference

Installing Mercurial from Source

• On a Unix-Like System
• On Windows