Overview

1.1. Distributed Version control system

With a distributed version control system you basically do not have a central code repository but everyone has its own branch. To can clone a branch and you always get the full history of the whole branch on your system. You commit into your own branch and you can push your changes to other repositories and other people can pull from you.

The main advantages of distributed version control systems are

• Speed: As the whole repository is offline available you can much faster search and compare

• Commits: Everyone can commit to his own branch

Another popular distributed version control systems is Git .

1.2. Mercurial

Mercurial is a distributed version control system. Mercurial is used by Oracle for the OpenJDK development and offered as a option by Google in Google hosting.

Mercurial is written in Python. Mercurial has a command-line interface. Eclipse provides also a plugin to use Mercurial.