WHAT is Mercurial?

So I've spent the last 2 hours installing mercurial again and again only to find it doesn't do anything. So can someone please point out exactly what Mercurial is?

Is it a standalone application or does it hook onto Terminal?

Running Max OS X 10.6.8 on VirtualBox.

Thanks guys, really really appreciate it.

mercurial mac os osx

asked Apr 13 '12 at 14:16

Taz155
191●16●21●27

I have a question.....why install something that you don't know what it does...

(Apr 13 '12 at 22:40) pjob797

Why ARE you installing something you don't have a clue about?!

(Apr 14 '12 at 11:04) RafalChmiel

Read my comment for joseph, applies to you two aswell.

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:24) Taz155

Because you should know what the heck something is before you say "Herp derp let me download this virus.exe and see what it does, it doesn't seem like it will do anything bad what so ever" and we said the same exact thing he did and googling it would be the obvious thing to do.

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:27) pjob797

Ok, make your assumptions before you know me. You obviously don't know what Mercurial is either if you think it's a virus.

& yeah, that's why I said look at the reply to Joseph.

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:41) Taz155

No I don't know what it is, but i look something up before I download and install it.

(Apr 14 '12 at 16:55) pjob797

VirtualBox. Thankyou.

(Apr 14 '12 at 17:03) Taz155

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2 Answers:

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Google it. But seriously you should not be downloading software that you don't know what it does. That could lead to a virus. And that is a pain to deal with. I have never downloaded anything that I didn't know the purpose of. Do be more careful with your browsing.

answered Apr 13 '12 at 23:44

josephLtech
1.7k●124●143●162

Thanks for the great advice. You know, just imagine if the world was run by people like you, everyone would be using old tactics and nothing would get done.

WHY am I not aloud to experiment? Seriously, I can't say this for the whole forum but you select few are just like, useless. And I'm sorry but it's true.

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:23) Taz155

Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is mainly implemented using the Python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in C. It is supported on Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Linux. Mercurial is primarily a command line program but graphical user interface extensions are available. All of Mercurial's operations are invoked as arguments to its driver program hg, a reference to the chemical symbol of the element mercury. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, decentralized, fully distributed collaborative development, robust handling of both plain text and binary files, and advanced branching and merging capabilities, while remaining conceptually simple. It includes an integrated web interface. Mercurial has also taken steps to ease the transition for SVN users. The creator and lead developer of Mercurial is Matt Mackall. Mercurial is released as free software under the terms of the GNU GPL v2.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial

answered Apr 14 '12 at 11:03

RafalChmiel
491●138●151●156

Thankyou for the only sensible comment.

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:24) Taz155

No problem... (do you mean answer? not comment :-)

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:36) RafalChmiel

By the way, if you know what Subversion control, Git or revision control is then that's something like Mercurial!

(Apr 14 '12 at 15:37) RafalChmiel

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