Mercurial

Mercurial delivers a scalable source and version control management system that can fit any type of project, regardless of its size and the number of contributors. Created in Python, it provides distributable binaries for all the major platforms, helping developers with their work.

The purpose of Mercurial is to help developers revision their documents in an efficient manner, tracking changes and helping teams collaborate much easier, with significant effects on productivity. It is easy to use, lightweight and completely customizable, aiming to meet the requirements and needs of all users.

Using an automated revision control model enables teams to easily track a project's history and members to try solving the same problem simultaneously, compare the solution each came up with and choose the best one. In other words, they can collaborate with each other, solving incompatibility issues much easier and revert to an earlier version in case of a mistake.

Mercurial is an important player in the sector of open-source version control systems. Unlike some of its direct competitors, it features easy-to-understand command sets, having built a reputation for being simple to learn. Mercurial is capable of importing the revision history from various other repositories, created, for instance, with CVS, Git or Subversion.

No dependencies are needed by Mercurial, so deployment is easy. It uses the command console to start its main application, displaying all its commands and explanations for each. A thorough read of the extensive, detailed documentation can help you get started if you are not familiar with version control systems.

Mercurial can clone repositories and manage changesets committed by a large number of contributors, enabling any team member to browse a specific revision. Changes can be pulled out of other repositories or pushed to another repository.

Changes can be kept locally or easily shared over a network, so as to allow other users to explore the changeset and provide their own suggestions.