Mercurial 1.1 - a major feature release

The Mercurial project is described as: "a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects." The Major Features document presents an overview of Mercurial's capabilities and Understanding Mercurial explains how Mercurial works as a distributed source control system.

Mercurial version 1.1 was announced this week: "This is a major release with numerous new features."

The What's New document explains the many changes that were added to Mercurial 1.1. Highlights include a new resolve command for tracking in-progress merges, a new repository format, performance improvements, support for Python 2.6, bug fixes and work on the documentation. The web interface now has a canvas-based repository graph, new themes, improved WSGI compliance, support for the display of nested repositories and other improvements.

The Mercurial commands have gone through numerous improvements and extensions, some bugs have also been fixed. Some new extensions have been added to Mercurial 1.1, including a rebase extension for rebasing changesets, a bookmarks extension for providing git-like branches, a zeroconf extension for publishing repositories and an hgcia extension for communicating with CIA. Some of the existing extensions have undergone a variety of improvements. Version 1.2 of the mercurial plugin for the Eclipse IDE was also announced this week.

According to Wikipedia, Mercurial was started in 2005 and the software is being used by such high profile projects as Mozilla, OpenSolaris and Xen. This latest release shows that the code continues to undergo active development, and holds an important place in the world of source code control systems.