CodePlex now supports Mercurial

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by Peter Galli on January 23, 2010 08:00am

The CodePlex team announced last night that it now supports Mercurial, a distributed source control management system. New projects created on CodePlex.com will now be able to use either Team Foundation Server or Mercurial as the source control repository.

Current project owners who want to switch to Mercurial can do so by contacting CodePlex Support with the project name, and the team will gladly assist.

Mercurial is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) and, unlike Team Foundation Server, DVCS has a very different model for collaborating on an open source project:

  • Anyone can clone. (Create local repository, Get all change sets from repository)
  • Anyone can commit. (Check-in to their local repository)
  • Anyone can pull. (Get all change sets from repository)
  • Only team can push. (Check-in of local repository to CodePlex)

So, why the need for another option? According to Sara Ford, the Program Manager for CodePlex, adding DVCS to CodePlex has become a top feature request from users as the popularity of DVCS for open source development has grown significantly.

"Mercurial is one of the most popular distributed version control systems and offers great support for Windows based tools as well as works very well as a hosted service," she says.