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Mercurial's decentralized development model can be confusing to new users. This page attempts to illustate some of the basic concepts. Mercurial's decentralized development model can be confusing to new users. This page attempts to illustrate some of the basic concepts.

Mercurial's decentralized development model can be confusing to new users. This page attempts to illustrate some of the basic concepts. See the ["Tutorial"] for step-by-step instructions.

TableOfContents

What's in a Repository

Mercurial repositories contain a working directory coupled with a store:

The store contains the complete history of the project. Unlike traditional SCMs, where there's only one central copy of this history, every working directory is paired with a private copy of the history. This allows development to go on in parallel.

The working directory contains a copy of the project's files at a given point in time (eg rev 2), ready for editing. Because tags and ignored files are revision-controlled, they are also included.

Committing Changes

When you commit, the state of the working directory relative to its parents is recorded as a new revision:

Note here that revision 4 is a branch off revision 2, which was the revision in the working directory. Now revision 4 is the working directory's parent.

Revisions, Changesets, Heads, and Tip

Mercurial groups related changes to multiple files into single atomic changesets, which are revisions of the whole project. These each get a sequential revision number. Because Mercurial allows distributed parallel development, these revision numbers may disagree between users. So Mercurial also assigns each revision a global changeset ID. Changeset IDs are 40-digit hexadecimal numbers, but they can be abbreviated to any unambiguous prefix, like "e38487".

Branches and merges in the revision history can occur at any point. Each unmerged branch creates a new head of the revision history. Here, revisions 5 and 6 are heads. Mercurial considers revision 6 to be the tip of the repository, the head with the highest revision number.

Cloning, Making Changes, Merging, and Pulling

Let's start with a user Alice, who has a store that looks like:

Bob clones this repo, and ends up with a complete copy of Alice's store (though his working directory is independent!):

Bob then commits a couple changes:

Alice then makes her own change in parallel:

Bob then pulls Alice's repo to synchronize. This copies all of Alice's changes into Bob's repo:

Because Alice's g is the newest head in Bob's repository, it's now the tip. Bob then does a merge which combines the last change he was working on (f) with the tip, commits the result, and ends up with:

Now if Alice pulls from Bob, she will get Bob's changes e, f, and h, and they will be fully synchronized:

A Decentralized System

Mercurial is a completely decentralized system, and thus has no internal notion of a central repository. Thus users are free to define their own topologies for sharing changes:

For a hands-on introduction to using Mercurial, see the ["Tutorial"].

UnderstandingMercurial (last edited 2013-09-02 20:00:50 by WagnerBruna)