I’ve been using Mercurial, a distributed version-control system, for a while now at home. Even without using a DVCS’s distributed nature, they make a great choice for a personal version control system: They all share the common trait that they keep all version history on the local system; most centralized VCSes keep only the latest versions locally with the historical versions kept only on the central server.
The latest release of Mercurial and TortoiseHg, a set of Windows shell extensions and GUI tools for Mercurial, was just released. This latest version (v1.5 and v1.0, respectively) includes both tools integrated into an MSI installer built with WiX. Previous versions were built with (the excellent but non-MSI-based) Inno Setup toolset. The WiX-based installer has the advantage of using a merge module for TortoiseOverlays (login as guest with an empty password), an icon overlay handler shared by shell extensions for several different version control systems: TortoiseHg for Mercurial, TortoiseSVN for Subversion, TortoiseCVS for CVS, TortoiseBZR for Bazaar, TortoiseGit for Git, and probably others.
As usual, I opened the TortoiseHg .msi in Orca before installing it on my workstation. I was pleasantly surprised by the low number of custom actions. I ran it through WiX v3.0’s Smoke.exe to run ICE validation; there were lots of errors and warnings but all but a few were from TortoiseHg’s use of the Visual C++ runtime libraries merge modules. (Is it ironic or just plain sad that they have so many ICE errors? Maybe both.)
Though we don’t use Mercurial for WiX version control—yet, anyway—both SourceForge.net and Codeplex support Mercurial for a project’s VCS.
Comments 1
This post reminded me of this:
http://www.mail-archive.com/wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg23963.html
If wix still has 2 master repositories, I can certainly see the case for mercurial.
Posted 06 Mar 2010 at 18:00 ¶