We are moving the mobile robotics lab to Mercurial for source code control and management.
Mercurial is a source code control system (i.e. version control system) similar to CVS, SVN (subversion) or SCCS, if you know any of those. That means it helps you keep track of a set of files, recover an old version of a file, or combine the work of multiple authors. Mercurial in used via the command-line command "hg" (Hg being the symbol for the element Mercury). Mercurial is distributed inder the GPL v2 (i.e. it is true open source).
Example of Mercurial web interface
I have been looking for a CVS replacement for some time, and narrowed the choices down to a couple of options some time ago.
The full set of tradeoffs is a long story (see references below), but the key features that Mercurial has are:
1- platform independence (works on Linux, Windows, QNX, and Mac OS X).
2- web based interface (works via command line, or HTTP, or HTTPS, or SSH). GUI clients also.
3- easy to learn and use (with command-line interface similar to svn and CVS, but also differences in semantics).
4- distributed version control; no central server required.
Mercurial also allows an repository to be imported from CVS or SVN, so migration should be not-too-hard.
I believe the 4 issues above, and especially ...
... ...
There's more. Read the whole story on "Mobile robotics lab moving to Mercurial"
