hgbook
view en/tour.tex @ 87:0995016342f8
More bumf.
| author | Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@serpentine.com> |
|---|---|
| date | Wed Oct 04 17:11:53 2006 -0700 (2006-10-04) |
| parents | b7c69a68b0cc |
| children | d351032c189c |
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1 \chapter{A lightning tour of Mercurial}
2 \label{chap:tour}
4 \section{Installing Mercurial on your system}
5 \label{sec:tour:install}
7 Prebuilt binary packages of Mercurial are available for every popular
8 operating system. These make it easy to start using Mercurial on your
9 computer immediately.
11 \subsection{Linux}
13 Because each Linux distribution has its own packaging tools, policies,
14 and rate of development, it's difficult to give a comprehensive set of
15 instructions on how to install Mercurial binaries. The version of
16 Mercurial that you will end up with can vary depending on how active
17 the person is who maintains the package for your distribution.
19 To keep things simple, I will focus on installing Mercurial from the
20 command line under the most popular Linux distributions. Most of
21 these distributions provide graphical package managers that will let
22 you install Mercurial with a single click; the package name to look
23 for is \texttt{mercurial}.
25 \begin{itemize}
26 \item[Debian]
27 \begin{codesample4}
28 apt-get install mercurial
29 \end{codesample4}
31 \item[Fedora Core]
32 \begin{codesample4}
33 yum install mercurial
34 \end{codesample4}
36 \item[Gentoo]
37 \begin{codesample4}
38 emerge mercurial
39 \end{codesample4}
41 \item[OpenSUSE]
42 \begin{codesample4}
43 yum install mercurial
44 \end{codesample4}
46 \item[Ubuntu] Ubuntu's Mercurial package is particularly old, and you
47 should not use it. If you know how, you can rebuild and install the
48 Debian package. It's probably easier to build Mercurial from source
49 and simply run that; see section~\ref{sec:srcinstall:unixlike} for
50 details.
51 \end{itemize}
53 \subsection{Mac OS X}
55 Lee Cantey publishes an installer of Mercurial for Mac OS~X at
56 \url{http://mercurial.berkwood.com}. This package works on both
57 Intel-~and Power-based Macs. Before you can use it, you must install
58 a compatible version of Universal MacPython~\cite{web:macpython}. This
59 is easy to do; simply follow the instructions on Lee's site.
61 \subsection{Solaris}
63 XXX.
65 \subsection{Windows}
67 Lee Cantey publishes an installer of Mercurial for Windows at
68 \url{http://mercurial.berkwood.com}. This package has no external
69 dependencies; it ``just works''.
71 \begin{note}
72 The Windows version of Mercurial does not automatically convert line
73 endings between Windows and Unix styles. If you want to share work
74 with Unix users, you must do a little additional configuration
75 work. XXX Flesh this out.
76 \end{note}
78 \section{Getting started}
80 To begin, we'll use the \hgcmd{version} command to find out whether
81 Mercurial is actually installed properly. The actual version
82 information that it prints isn't so important; it's whether it prints
83 anything at all that we care about.
84 \interaction{tour.version}
86 \subsection{Built-in help}
88 Mercurial provides a built-in help system. This invaluable for those
89 times when you find yourself stuck trying to remember how to run a
90 command. If you are completely stuck, simply run \hgcmd{help}; it
91 will print a brief list of commands, along with a description of what
92 each does. If you ask for help on a specific command (as below), it
93 prints more detailed information.
94 \interaction{tour.help}
95 For a more impressive level of detail (which you won't usually need)
96 run \hgcmdargs{help}{\hggopt{-v}}. The \hggopt{-v} option is short
97 for \hggopt{--verbose}, and tells Mercurial to print more information
98 than it usually would.
100 \section{Working with a repository}
102 In Mercurial, everything happens inside a \emph{repository}. The
103 repository for a project contains all of the files that ``belong to''
104 that project, along with a historical record of the project's files.
106 There's nothing particularly magical about a repository; it is simply
107 a directory tree in your filesystem that Mercurial treats as special.
108 You can rename delete a repository any time you like, using either the
109 command line or your file browser.
111 \subsection{Making a copy of a repository}
113 \emph{Copying} a repository is just a little bit special. While you
114 could use a normal file copying command to make a copy of a
115 repository, it's best to use a built-in command that Mercurial
116 provides. This command is called \hgcmd{clone}, because it creates an
117 identical copy of an existing repository.
118 \interaction{tour.clone}
119 If our clone succeeded, we should now have a local directory called
120 \dirname{hello}. This directory will contain some files.
121 \interaction{tour.ls}
122 These files have the same contents and history in our repository as
123 they do in the repository we cloned.
125 Every Mercurial repository is complete, self-contained, and
126 independent. It contains its own private copy of a project's files
127 and history. A cloned repository remembers the location of the
128 repository it was cloned from, but it does not communicate with that
129 repository, or any other, unless you tell it to.
131 What this means for now is that we're free to experiment with our
132 repository, safe in the knowledge that it's a private ``sandbox'' that
133 won't affect anyone else.
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