What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a free, cross-platform, distributed configuration management/version control tool. Originally written to run on Linux, it has subsequently been ported to Windows, Mac OS X, and most other Unix-like systems.

The Mercurial source code is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 but is NOT open source (a small but significant differentiation). Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, decentralised, fully distributed collaborative development (much like Git), robust handling of both plain text and binary files, and advanced branching and merging capabilities.

The most popular GUI interface for Mercurial is Hgk (Tcl/Tk) which is part of the official version.

Mercurial was originally developed for use on development of the Linux kernel, this project eventually chose the alternative product Git however, Mercurial is now used by many other projects including Mozilla Firefox and OpenSolaris.

It’s important to note that no solution is ideal for every organisation, Mercurial is not a straight forward replacement for a centralised version control system like Subversion.

Why Mercurial?

• Free to download and use.
• Mercurial can run across a multitude of platforms.
• Mercurial is designed to have great performance and to have performance that scales well.
• Robust handling of both plain text and binary files, and advanced branching and merging capabilities.