Mercurial hosting

Revision control management which is also known as version control management or source control management is basically the management of changes to the documents, programs, and any other information that is stored as computer files. These changes are generally identified by a number or letter code, which are termed as the "revision level", "revision number" or simply "revision". For example, a first set of files is the "revision 1". As the first set of change is made, this set becomes "revision 2", and it goes on in this way. Each of this revision is linked with a timestamp and the person who is making the change. These revisions can be compared, restored, as also merged. Usually these systems are used in the development of softwares.

The version control systems most commonly run as the stand alone applications, but even here revision control is embedded in various types of software. These softwares include word processors such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, KWord, Pages, etc, spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org Calc, KSpread, Numbers, etc., as also in the various content management systems like the Drupal, Joomla, WordPress. In wikis, revision control systems allow reverting a page back to previous revision. This is critical for permitting the editors to track other's edits, make corrections, as also defend the public wikis against spam.

Mercurial hosting provides a very fast and lightweight Source Control Management system which has been designed for well organized handling of very big distributed projects. Mercurial hosting application is a cross platform revision control tool specifically for the software developers. It is mainly based on the Python programming language. It is supported on the Unix like and the Windows systems like the Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Linux. Mercurial hosting is mainly a command line program but even the graphical user interface extensions are available here. Most of the Mercurial's operations are called upon as the keyword options to its driver program hg. The mercurial hosting application has been created and developed by Matt Mackall. It has been released as a free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Advantages of Mercurial Version Control:

• Speedy & lightweight
• Decentralized
• Great scalability
• Easy to customize
• Integrated web interface
• It is conceptually very simple
• User friendly & relatively easy to learn
• High performance and scalability
• it comes with advanced branching and merging capabilities
• Free to use
• It is fully distributed collaborative development
• Provides a proper handling of both, the plain text and binary files

Mercurial hosting uses SHA-1 hashes for the purpose of identification of revisions. It makes use of the hypertext transfer protocol for the repository access via a network which also seeks to bring down the round trip requests, new connections and the data transferred. Mercurial hosting also works over SSH where the protocol is very similar to the protocol based on HTTP. It uses a 3-way merge by default before calling the external merge tools.

More info:
Official Mercurial website