Versioning tools

Versioning code is one of the important good practices when programming in any language.

Git

Git is nowadays the most popular versioning tool. It is a great tool but it can be a bit difficult and unsafe, especially for beginners.

Windows

Download and install from https://gitforwindows.org/.

macOS

brew install git

Debian-Ubuntu-Mint

sudo apt install git

Meld

Meld is a graphical diff and merge tool.

Windows

Download and execute the installer here: https://meldmerge.org/

macOS

Install meld with:

brew install --cask meld

Debian-Ubuntu-Mint

sudo apt install meld

Mercurial

Modern Mercurial

Mercurial is a versioning tool like Git (same generation and similar theoretical bases). For very simple things, it is quite similar to Git. However, there are also important differences.

Github and Gitlab do not support Mercurial. Git became for open-source THE tool used for versioning all kinds of projects.

However, Mercurial has been used in companies of all sizes for years and grew up as a great tool, with advantages compared to Git, in particular in terms of simple user interface, safety (no force push needed, no destructive history edition), performance for big repositories (with a growing part written in Rust) and collaborative history edition (with this Mercurial extensions evolve and topic).

Mercurial is an versioning tool similar to but different than Git. It is used for the repository of this training so it is very reasonable to install it to get the source.

To install and setup Mercurial for modern Mercurial usage, one needs to be a bit careful and follow in the right order simple instructions. Therefore, the python CNRS working group dedicates a specific page for this task: Install and setup Mercurial.

However, to be able to clone the repository of this training, it should be sufficient to just use:

Windows ➜ winget

TortoiseHg, Mercurial and few important extensions can be installed with Winget:

winget install TortoiseHg.TortoiseHg -e --accept-package-agreements

Alternatively, one can download an installer and run it to install TortoiseHG.

Linux and macOS ➜ UV

uv tool install mercurial --with hg-git,hg-evolve

On macOS, it can be useful to also add --with certifi

DO NOT USE this method on Windows!

Mercurial should be configured

A reasonable default configuration file can be created with:

uvx hg-setup init