Mercurial Source Control: Which Hosting Provider Supports It Best?

Easy to Learn

Affectionately referred to by its user base as ‘hg’ – the scientific notation for the element mercury, it is well-regarded as an excellent platform.

Mercurial has all the features and functions in the most common platforms with the twist of performance while still incorporating intuition and ease of use.

The complete suite of Mercurial functionality can be learned or explored in just about a day, especially for those that are disciples of and experienced in other platforms.

Not only is the distributed source control more efficient, but it implements a kind of backup plan. If one of the participating servers dies, the repositories can provide a copy.

Further, developers have an easier time collaborating remotely. Mercurial’s distributed architecture makes branching, merging, and committing affordable and fast.

Mercurial is not only extremely fast and scalable, it is a very simple system to run and learn, which makes it very appealing to many developers. It has functions that are similar to other Control Version Systems (CVS), but there aren’t as many functions to learn altogether.

As with other CVS systems, Mercurial focuses on maintaining a single copy of source code files and records of all the changes from the team working on it.

If a developer is looking for a particular version, the CVS is able to recreate the file by reconstructing the recorded changes that make up that particular version that the developer requires.

Contributors can commit changes when desired, merging the changes into a common directory. Mercurial also comes out of the box with a stand-alone Web interface and extensive documentation.

One thing to note is that it is so streamlined and efficient that the community that supports it is not as active as other competitive platforms like Git.

Mercurial developers tend to work swiftly on the projects that they have and that is a testament to the efficiency of the product. In order to make Mercurial independent of any one platform, it is written in the Python programming language, with a small portion of it written in C.

This way, most major platforms can give a binary release. Mercurial is an open-source, extensible application.

You may write your own extensions, activate the official ones included with the system, or download some from the wiki. More Mercurial resources and important links here.

Interested in a great deal on Mercurial hosting?
A2 Hosting scored #1 in our recent speed and performance tests. Mercurial comes pre-installed on their plans. Currently, you can save up to 50% on A2 plans. Use this special discount link to sign up.

Hosting Repositories

You can select free or paid Mercurial hosting from a wide range of providers. Some things to consider are how many developers you need to include, other collaborative services you use, and the size of your repositories.

Other features in Version Control

• SVN

About John Casaretto

John’s focus is on cloud consulting. But he’s had a varied career working in business development and cybersecurity. He lives in Colorado.

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