According to its developers, "Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects." Dozens of projects already use the software. Here's how you can get started with some basic version control tasks using Mercurial.

Mercurial is a great distributed version control system written in Python. It is a "fast, lightweight source control management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects".

LONDON, December 14, 2007 -- Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu and Bazaar projects, today announced the general availability of Bazaar 1.0, a version control system enabling multiple, distributed developers to contribute to software projects independently in a controlled, managed way.

"Welcome to the home of the book 'Distributed revision control with Mercurial', by Bryan O'Sullivan. This is a freely licensed book about the Mercurial revision control system..."

"Since Linus Torvalds presentation at Google about git in May 2007, the adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems has been constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of Distributed Version Control, see when to use it, why it may be better than what you're currently using, and have a look at three actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar..."

"I’ve been meaning to set up a Version Control System for a long time now. VCS as a concept has been around for a while but recently a new paradigm in VCS called DVCS (for distributed version control system) has emerged. This new paradigm has cured or at least mitigated the warts of the old “centralized” version control systems and brought new benefits.

This document summarizes the initial research for adding distributed version control as an option for Google Code. Based on popularity, two distributed version control systems were considered: Git and Mercurial. This document describes the features of the two systems, and provides an overview of the work required to integrate them with Google Code.

"Mercurial [Hg for short] is a Distributed Version Control System. Instead of using a single repository per project, each developer can have their own repository." -- via

"There’s a change in the air. High-profile projects such as the Linux Kernel, Mozilla, Gnome, and Ruby on Rails are now using Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) instead of the old stand-bys of CVS or Subversion. Git is a modern, fast DVCS. But understanding how it fits into your development can be a daunting task without an introduction to the new concepts.