Mercurial Frequently Asked Questions

Section 1: General Usage

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There are two parts to Mercurial: the repository and the working

into the local one but doesn't alter the working directory.

This keeps you from upsetting your work in progress, which may not be

ready to merge with the new changes you've pulled and also allows you

to manage merging more easily (see below about best practices).

Mercurial will generally allow you to refer to a revision in three

ways: by revision number, by changeset ID, and by tag.

A revision number is a simple decimal number that corresponds with the

ordering of commits in the local repository. It is important to

understand that this ordering can change from machine to machine due

to Mercurial's distributed, decentralized architecture.

This is where changeset IDs come in. A changeset ID is a 160-bit

identifier that uniquely describes a changeset and its position in the

change history, regardless of which machine it's on. This is

represented to the user as a 40 digit hexadecimal number. As that

tends to be unwieldy, Mercurial will accept any unambiguous substring

of that number when specifying versions. It will also generally print

these numbers in "short form", which is the first 12 digits.

You should always use some form of changeset ID rather than the local

revision number when discussing revisions with other Mercurial users

as they may have different revision numbering on their system.

Finally, a tag is an arbitrary string that has been assigned a

correspondence to a changeset ID. This lets you refer to revisions

symbolically.

The central concept of Mercurial is branching. A 'branch' is simply

an independent line of development. In most other version control

systems, all users generally commit to the same line of development

called 'the trunk' or 'the main branch'. In Mercurial, every developer

effectively works on a private branch and there is no internal concept

of 'the main branch'.

Thus Mercurial works hard to make repeated merging between branches

'Heads' are simply the most recent commits on a branch. Technically,

they are changesets which have no children. Merging is the process of

joining points on two branches into one, usually at their current

The 'tip' is the most recently changed head, and also the highest

numbered revision. If you have just made a commit, that commit will be

the head. Alternately, if you have just pulled from another

repository, the tip of that repository becomes the current tip.

The 'tip' is the default revision for many commands such as update,

and also functions as a special symbolic tag.

The merge process is simple. Usually you will want to merge the tip

will incorporate the changes from tip into your local changes.

The first step of this process is tracing back through the history of

changesets and finding the 'common ancestor' of the two versions that

are being merged. This is done on a project-wide and a file by file

basis.

For files that have been changed in both projects, a three-way merge

is attempted to add the changes made remotely into the changes made

locally. If there are conflicts between these changes, the user is

prompted to interactively resolve them.

Mercurial uses a helper tool for this, which is usually found by the

hgmerge script. Example tools include tkdiff, kdiff3, and the classic

RCS merge.

After you've completed the merge and you're satisfied that the results

are correct, it's a good idea to commit your changes. Mercurial won't

allow you to perform another merge until you've done this commit as

that would lose important history that will be needed for future

merges.

Tags work slightly differently in Mercurial than most revision

systems. The design attempts to meet the following requirements:

- be version controlled and mergeable just like any other file

- allow signing of tags

- allow adding a tag to an already committed changeset

- allow changing tags in the future

Thus Mercurial stores tags as a file in the working dir. This file is

called .hgtags and consists of a list of changeset IDs and their

corresponding tags. To add a tag to the system, simply add a line to

effective tags.

Note that because tags refer to changeset IDs and the changeset ID is

effectively the sum of all the contents of the repository for that

change, it is impossible in Mercurial to simultaneously commit and add

a tag. Thus tagging a revision must be done as a second step.

The tags that are in effect at any given time are the tags specified

in each head, with heads closer to the tip taking precedence.

First, merge often! This makes merging easier for everyone and you

find out about conflicts (which are often rooted in incompatible

design decisions) earlier.

Second, don't hesitate to use multiple trees locally. Mercurial makes

this fast and light-weight. Typical usage is to have an incoming tree,

an outgoing tree, and a separate tree for each area being worked on.

The incoming tree is best maintained as a pristine copy of the

upstream repository. This works as a cache so that you don't have to

pull multiple copies over the network. No need to check files out here

as you won't be changing them.

The outgoing tree contains all the changes you intend for merger into

Then, for each feature you work on, create a new tree. Commit early

and commit often, merge with incoming regularly, and once you're

satisfied with your feature, pull the changes into your outgoing tree.

Take a look at contrib/convert-repo. This is an extensible

framework for converting between repository types.

Patches to support Windows are being actively integrated, a fully

working Windows version is probably not far off

Section 2: Technical

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Mercurial currently assumes that single files, indices, and manifests

can fit in memory for efficiency.

Offsets in revlogs are currently tracked with 32 bits, so a revlog for

a single file can currently not grow beyond 4G.

There should otherwise be no limits on file name length, file size,

file contents, number of files, or number of revisions.

The network protocol is big-endian.

File names cannot contain the null character. Committer addresses

cannot contain newlines.

Mercurial is primarily developed for UNIX systems, so some UNIXisms

may be present in ports.

Take a look at the hgeditor script for an example. The basic idea

is to sign the manifest ID inside that changelog entry. The manifest

ID is a recursive hash of all of the files in the system and their

complete history, and thus signing the manifest hash signs the entire

project to that point.

More precisely: each file hash is an SHA1 hash of the contents of that

file and the hashes of its parent revisions. The manifest contains a

list of each file in the project along with its current file hash.

This manifest is hashed similarly to the file hashes, incorporating

the hashes of the parent revisions.

The SHA1 hashes are large enough that the odds of accidental hash collision

are negligible for projects that could be handled by the human race.

The known weaknesses in SHA1 are currently still not practical to

attack, and Mercurial will switch to SHA256 hashing before that

becomes a realistic concern.

Collisions with the "short hashes" are not a concern as they're always

checked for ambiguity and are still long enough that they're not

likely to happen for reasonably-sized projects (< 1M changes).