For the last three weeks, development on my news program, Iceberg Races, has been in high gear. Each night before bed, I simply zipped up my work and archived it away. This approach was fine at first, as I was hammering out the design as I coded, which meant I took a lot of dead end paths. Large chunks of code and entire files were created and then deleted the next day (as I discovered better implementation methods.) It’s true that the best way to learn a language is to dive right in by writing ‘useful’ program.
On Wednesday, I realized that my code structure had stabilized a week prior and I was overdue for tracking my code in a source revision tool. Luckily, I ran across an amazing Mercurial tutorial and decided to give it a try.
So far I’m loving it. The commands are all straight forward. It was extremely quick to setup, and has perform admirably for the past two three days that I’ve been using it. I’ve summarized the most useful commands below (this is not an exhaustive list):
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| hg * | All commands start with hg followed by… |
| init | Create a new repository in current directory. |
| add | Add new files to repository |
| remove | Remove file from repository |
| status | View the status of the repository. This lists all the modified files, files that aren’t being tracked, and files that have been marked for deletion. |
| diff | View the differences between two different versions of a file. |
| commit | Save the current state of the files to the repository. |
| rollback | Undo the last one commit. |
| merge | Resolve conflicts in a file. |
| log | View the revision history. |
| update | Check out files to a specified revision |
| push | Copy changes in local repository to a remote repository. |
| pull | Copy changes in a remote repository and bring them into your local repository. |
I’ve bolded the commands that come in the handiest. This includes the operations to save the current state of the repository and how to restore a past state.
