Yes to Mercurial

Mercurial is a very nice alternative to svn. I have several projects in it now and I’m pretty happy with it. Here are some starter commands. These should be executed from the command line in the directory that you want to control.

$ hg init # creates .hg

$ hg add # add those ‘unknown’ files
$ hg commit # commit all changes into a new changeset, edit changelog entry
hg commit -m ‘updated bad links to style sheet and changed directory name’

$ hg parents # see the currently checked out revision (or changeset)

$ hg status # show all non-ignored files

$ hg help

# export your current repo via HTTP with browsable interface on port 8000
$ hg serve -n “My repo”

hg revert –all -r 268033ec7859
Backing out changes

Reverting the whole tree to a known-good revision
It’s easy, like using a sledgehammer is easy. But this is usually overkill.

$ hg pull -u
$ hg revert –all -r a0193d83c208 # use your known-good revision id here
$ hg commit # be kind, include the revision id in your commit message
$ hg push

There’s a more precise alternative:
Backing out a single changeset
Suppose changeset f8f4360bf155 broke something.
$ hg pull -u
$ hg backout f8f4360bf155 # use the revision id of the bad change here
This creates and commits a new changeset that reverts all the changes in that revision.