From Retrosoftware

Revision as of 14:05, 4 May 2010

RS Mercurial DVCS Repository

Introduction

Retro Software projects can make use of our Mercurial (aka hg) Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) repositories. Mercurial was chosen over the popular and more widely-known Subversion project because of the reported improvements in workflow, esp. in the area of merging. A good place to start investigating Mercurial, is the hginit.com tutorial which also compares the system with Subversion and describes the issues Mercurial was designed to address.

Whilst not quite as widely-supported as Subversion, Mercurial tool support is good enough for most purposes. There is a Mercurial Eclipse plugin as well as TortoiseHg, a GUI tool which integrates directly into Windows Explorer. Other RS forum members have also reported that there is a plugin to add integrated support into Microsoft's Visual Studio.

Browse the RS Mercurial repositories online (read-only)

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/hg/

Getting Started with the RS Mercurial repository and TortoiseHg

1. Post your request in the Retro Software Feedback and Site-Specific Chat forum for either write access to an existing project, or to request a new project repository to be setup - include a short one-word name for the project (e.g. "mynewrsproject").
   
   
2. When contacted, PM your preferred password to the RS administrator to allow the access to your requested projects to be configured.
   
   
3. When you've confirmed you have the correct username / password and that your access to the repository has been configured, download and install TortoiseHg (requires a reboot). When Windows has been rebooted, you should be able to right-click in Windows Explorer and see the TortoiseHg context menu:
   
   
   
   
4. If you need to (e.g. you're behind a corporate firewall), configure a proxy server now by selecting Global Settings from the TortoiseHg context menu and opening the Proxy settings:
   
   
   
   
5. Now configure your RS username used when committing by selecting Global Settings from the TortoiseHg context menu and opening the Commit settings. The Username field should be filled in with the form "RetroSoftwareForumName <youremailaddress>":
   
   
   
   
6. Create a directory within Windows Explorer with the name of the project you are accessing. Clone the repository from the Retro Software server by selecting Clone... off the TortoiseHg context menu from within that directory, which will therefore be used as the base of your local repository. The Destination path should be automatically filled in, so enter the Source path in the form "http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/hg/projectname". Check the Use proxy server box, if required and click the Clone button:
   
   
   
   After a short time of downloading the contents of the repository, the local directory should look something like this:
   
   
   
   Note: If the repository has been newly created for you, this step is still required and even though there are no other files until you create and commit them, you will still find a .hg directory is created to store the Mercurial meta-data for the repository.