Thread: Mercurial in programming

Mercurial is a decentralised system, despite the apparent complexity, it is a much simpler and faster system to set up and use.

The simplest way to use Mercurial, and one which will appease GUI buffs as well, is by using the TortoiseHG tool This software not only installs the Mercurial sytem, but also installs extensions to Windows Explorer. As a result, it makes it much simpler to perform the most common tasks. Using TortoiseHG you can manage your repositories easily from explorer.

After installing TortoiseHG, all you need to do to enable revision control is to simply right click in a folder and under the TortoiseHG menu click on "Create Repository Here". That's it! After a repository is created in a folder, you can instruct it to add the files to the repository using the Commit command.

Mercurial comes out as a much simple solution for single people maintaining a project, however as you bring in multiple people, each with their own version of the repository, SVN may seem worth the whole effort of setting up a server.