Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 6. Collaborating with Other People

As a completely decentralized tool, Mercurial doesn’t impose any policy on how people ought to work with each other. However, if you’re new to distributed revision control, it helps to have some tools and examples in mind when you’re thinking about possible workflow models.

Mercurial’s Web Interface

Mercurial has a powerful web interface that provides several useful capabilities.

For interactive use, the web interface lets you browse a single repository or a collection of repositories. You can view the history of a repository, examine each change (comments and diffs), and view the contents of each directory and file. You can even get a view of history that gives a graphical view of the relationships between individual changes and merges.

Also for human consumption, the web interface provides Atom and RSS feeds of the changes in a repository. This lets you “subscribe” to a repository using your favorite feed reader, and be automatically notified of activity in that repository as soon as it happens. I find this capability much more convenient than the model of subscribing to a mailing list to which notifications are sent, as it requires no additional configuration on the part of whoever is serving the repository.

The web interface also lets remote users clone a repository, pull changes from it, and (when the server is configured to permit it) push changes back to it. Mercurial’s HTTP tunneling protocol aggressively compresses data, so that it ...