Developer Info

Information on working on the Mercurial code base.

1. Start hacking

• Main repository — browse or clone the source (see DeveloperRepos for other repositories)

• Writing Mercurial extensions

• Theming Mercurial's web interface

• Some basic code examples

• Mercurial internal API

• Translating Mercurial — how to translate Mercurial into your own language

2. Contributing code

• Contributing changes

• Easy bugs — tasks flagged as easy, a good entry point for new contributors

• UIGuideline — how to make consistent UI choices

• Coding style

• Writing tests

• Help style guide — how to write nice help

• Compatibility rules — how we keep our existing users from crying

• Review process — how you can help get patches in

3. Internals

• Design - Mercurial's data structures and how it uses them

• File formats - list of Mercurial's disk file formats

• What goes where - the project architecture

• Wire protocol - the push/pull changegroup protocol

• Debugging features - how to poke around in Mercurial's internals

4. Working with the community

• Mailing lists

• Managing bugs — how to work with the bug tracker

• Time-based release plan

• Developer repositories — where to find various public repositories of Mercurial work

• Development process — an overview of our development and release workflow

• IRC — where most of the developers hang out

• Meetings — When we get the community together (about every 6 months)

• Project infrastructure — A list of project infrastructure and who administers it

5. Feature proposals

• List of new feature proposals

6. Developer tips

• MacOSXTools — Installing the tool chain on Mac OS X.

• Using Wine to test Windows support under Linux

• Easy way of starting Mercurial hacking on Windows with HackableMercurial

CategoryDeveloper