September 19, 2019 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.14.

What's Important about HgLab 1.14

Starting with this release HgLab now requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6.2 or later.

What’s New in HgLab 1.14

Pull Bundles

With Clone Bundles HgLab received performance boost for initial hg clone operations. Now, with Pull Bundles, hg pull s got just so much faster.

What HgLab does with Pull Bundles is essentialy it pre-computes and caches, well, bundles that are most likely to be pulled by clients.

What’s Improved in HgLab 1.14

Significant performance improvements for all Mercurial-related operations (think faster hg pull and hg push )

and ) Reduced memory usage and Large Object Heap optimizations

Improved JIRA, Slack and TeamCity Integration Extensions

Performance improvements in Clone Bundles

May 23, 2017 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.12.

JIRA, TeamCity and Slack Integrations

HgLab can now be integrated with JIRA, TeamCity and Slack.

JIRA Integration Extension attaches Remote Issue Links to relevant commits in HgLab. This is what it looks like in JIRA:

Slack Integration Extension posts messages to a Slack channel whenever commits are pushed to HgLab. This is what it looks like in Slack:

TeamCity Integration Extension uses VCS Post-Commit Hooks to trigger builds in TeamCity. This feature significantly reduces load on both TeamCity and HgLab.

Head over to the Extensibility documentation article to learn more.

Clone Bundles

If your HgLab installation serves repositories (say, over 100 Mb) or is under heavy load from frequent clones (say, from your build server), this feature will make scaling problems mostly go away.

Here’s what is going on under the hood when a Mercurial client clones a repository from a Clone Bundles-enabled server. First it checks whether the server advertises a list of pre-generated bundle files. If it does, a client doing the cloning first downloads the most appropriate bundle (a very fast operation), applies it locally (a very fast operation as well), and then effectively does an additional hg pull against the original repository to fetch any new commits that were pushed since the time the bundle was generated.

To put things into perspective, here is a standard clone operation with Clone Bundles disabled:

That’s almost two minutes.

Now, with Clone Bundles enabled:

Less than 30 seconds of wall time with not a lot of heavy-lifting by the server.

While we’re at it, remember that HgLab also has LAN Optimizations for Private Networks.

Starting from Mercurial 3.7, the Clone Bundles feature is enabled by default in all Mercurial clients. Head over to the Clone Bundles documentation article to learn more.

Happy Coding

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and get back to writing that awesome code, with HgLab being the center of your collaboration!

Thanks and stay tuned!

February 07, 2016 • • ∞

The Issue

Not so long ago, the immensely useful Mercurial Keyring extension has stopped working for certain TortoiseHg versions in a specific scenario.

The problem is as follows: when operating on URLs that include a username (like http://username@example.com/hg ), Keyring extension keeps on prompting for username and password.

One thing to note here is that this is decidedly not a TortoiseHg issue per se, since all TortoiseHg is doing is shelling out to Mercurial and parsing the output (in reality, internal workings are quite more complicated, but the essential idea remains the same). Hence, the issue lies elsewhere.

The Investigation

My quick testing has shown that the regression started to manifest itself in TortoiseHg 3.6.2 (the hg.exe is the one that comes with TortoiseHg; output truncated for readability):

$ hg version Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 3.6.2) (see https://mercurial-scm.org for more information) ... $ hg pull -R d:\projects\hgrpclib --debug pulling from http://anton.gogolev@live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib using http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib http auth: user anton.gogolev, password not set sending capabilities command ... keyring: base url: http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib, url user: , url pwd: ... keyring: username not specified in hgrc (or in url). Password will not be saved. http authorization required realm: HgLab Live url: http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib user: interrupted!

Downgrading to TortoiseHg 3.6.1 fixed the issue:

$ hg version Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 3.6.1) (see https://mercurial-scm.org for more information) ... $ hg pull -R d:\projects\hgrpclib --debug pulling from http://anton.gogolev@live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib using http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib http auth: user anton.gogolev, password not set sending capabilities command [HgKeyring] Keyring URL: http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib [HgKeyring] Looking for password for user anton.gogolev and url http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib [HgKeyring] Keyring password found. Url: http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hglab/hgrpclib, user: anton.gogolev, passwd: ******** preparing listkeys for "bookmarks" ...

To completely cross off TortoiseHg from a list of suspects, I decided to review changes between tags 3.6.1 and 3.6.2. As expected, there was nothing suspicious. Next on the list: Mercurial.

Mercurial Wiki on Using Mercurial Extensions tells that keyring extension is not distributed together with Mercurial proper, which is confirmed by the fact that no code changes in Mercurial between tags 3.6.1 and 3.6.2 either related to keyring or in any way change the internal API.

Next up: Keyring extension.

Looking at the commit history, there were quite a few changes, but which of these made it to TortoiseHg 3.6.2? Turns out, there is a separate TortoiseHg-related repository, tortoisehg/thg-winbuild, which has several interesting changesets, ultimately bumping bundled Keyring extension from 0.7.1 to 1.0.1.

The Conclusion

So here is the situation: TortoiseHg 3.6.2 upgraded to Mercurial 3.6.2, plus upgraded several extension, most notably Keyring. Somewhere along the way there was something that started causing the issue. Keyring 0.7.1 was working just fine Mercurial 3.6.1. Keyring 1.0.1 has stopped working with Mercurial 3.6.2, yet there were no internal API changes introduced in this minor version bump.

One of the Solutions

I’m not very well-versed in Python or proficient in writing Mercurial extension, so I’m out of my depth trying to solve the root cause of this issue. Meanwhile, there’s a way to work around this issue without downgrading TortoiseHg or fiddling with source code.

Keyring documentation says that adding the following to account-level hgrc solves this issue entirely (plus, it is the recommended way to use Keyring extension anyway):

[auth] bitbucket.prefix = https://bitbucket.org/ bitbucket.username = username-at-bitbucket hglab.prefix = http://hglab.example.com/ hglab.username = username-at-hglab

July 08, 2015 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.9. This release adds two often-requested features: support for adding entire Groups to Project Teams and Simplified Authorization.

Teams and Groups

It’s just what it says on the tin: not only Users can now be added to Teams, but entire G roups:

Simplified Authorization

Up until version 1.9, HgLab was defaulting to displaying a 404 page whenever a user attempted to access an inaccessible project — that is, the one that he or she was not a member of.

This was done to prevent unnecessary information disclosure and was particularly useful if a HgLab installation had Public Access enabled.

With Simplified Authorization enabled, unauthenticated users navigating to inaccessible projects will be redirected to Signin page instead of being shown a "Page Not Found" error.



Happy Coding

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and get back to writing that awesome code, with HgLab being the center of your collaboration!

Thanks and stay tuned!

February 11, 2015 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.8. Among other things, this update adds support for Largefiles extension.

Largefiles Extension

Support for Largefiles extension has been one of the most requested features for HgLab. From now on, HgLab can become your centralized store for large, non-compressible, non-diffable files. Just check the checkbox during repository creation and you’ll be all set.

Now, client-side Largefiles extension offers a several configuration options, and wouldn’t it be nice if you could enforce unified configuration for all clients? This can be achieved with ProjRc Extension, which is also supported by HgLab: add these settings to configuration options to be transferred to clients and you’ll be all set:

[largefiles] minsize = 2 # Add all files of over 2 Mb as largefiles patterns = *.jpg *.{png,bmp} # These files will always be tracked as largefiles

Links

With links, you can – yup, that’s right – link your repositories to whatever external content that matters to you and your team. It’s just a matter of specifying a custom regular expression and a replacement URL – and your commit messages and discussions will be automatically linked to wherever you want them to be linked to.

Head over to the HgLab Documentation to find out more.

Miscellanea

This release also features a revamped Activity Stream engine, which is not very visible from the outside, but which lays a foundation for upcoming Issues and Merge Requests. One notable change is that now you’ll be receiving email notifications for all updates to Project Wikis.

HgLab Installer also got a little bit smarter and now performs quite a few sanity checks in order to ensure that HgLab installs well and good.

And as usual, we’re actively working on improving both UX and performance.

Happy Coding

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and get back to writing that awesome code, with HgLab being the center of your collaboration!

Thanks and stay tuned!

December 09, 2014 • • ∞

The 1.7.6 release for HgLab is now available for download from https://hglabhq.com/download.

This release fixes a number of performance issues that occur when working with particularly large repositories.

Release Notes

Fixes

Fixed incorrect behavior of a Backup Healthcheck

Fixed incorrect behavior with branch names with whitespaces

Enhancements

Performance optimizations in Linguist

Performance improvements for large repositories

Do not analyze commit activity for repositories with over 100K commits

Performance optimizations in changeset filter

Disable Graphs for repositories with over 100K commits

Performance optimizations in HgFlow detection logic

Thanks!

The HgLab Team

August 20, 2014 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.7. This is quite significant update, with lots of new features and many, many improvements to existing ones.

Goodbye, HgLab 0.x

Well, not literally goodbye. It’s only that HgLab 1.7 cannot be upgraded to from pre-1.0 versions of HgLab, of which there are very few in the wild. There was a big chunk of hairy code to manage all the transitions that HgLab has undergone over the last 1,5 years, and I was more than happy to cut it all out.

If you’re upgrading from HgLab 0.4.6 or earlier, see the Upgrading from HgLab 1.4 and Earlier note in the documentation.

Wiki

Having good documentation is crucial to the success of a project. HgLab now includes a full-featured project-level Wiki, backed by a Mercurial repository. You can edit it via HgLab web interface, or you can take the entire knowledge base with you and work with it just as you would with an ordinary Mercurial repository full of Markdown files.

There’s more about Wiki in HgLab Documentation.

Hooks

Every Repository in HgLab now has the option to communicate with a web server whenever the Repository is pushed to. These "hooks" can be used to update an external issue tracker, trigger CI builds, update a backup mirror, or even deploy to your production server.

As always, see documentation for more details – how to add and ping hooks, what the payload looks like and how does HgLab sign the request.

Redesigned Repositories Page

The Repositories page has been revamped and given a lot more room to breathe. This redesign lays the foundation for a lot more exciting upcoming features that will turn HgLab into the best code collaboration platform.

Dashboard Live Filter

Companies use HgLab to manage dozens and dozens of projects and repositories, and finding the right one can be quite tedious. With this release HgLab gets a nice UX improvement, whereby you can filter projects and repositories right on the Dashboard, so finding the one you need will become much simpler:

Miscellaneous

This release features a redesigned Profile page, with previously monolithic page nicely split up into related tabs. And you can change passwords, too (provided that the Catalog you’re in allows for it).

Email notifications now include the name of the project they are related to. This makes setting up filters in your mail client a little bit easier.

One more thing about email: as per a very popular request, settings in Administration – Email are now saved no matter what – even if the SMTP server cannot be reached or you entered invalid credentials.

HgLab got a bit smarter in that it allows any repository-related URL to be used as clone, push and pull target. Where previously the only URL you could feed to Mercurial clients was something like http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hgsharp/hgsharp , now you can use the http://live.hglabhq.com/projects/hgsharp/repositories/hgsharp URL and be just fine.

Happy Coding

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and get back to writing that awesome code, with HgLab being the center of your collaboration!

July 07, 2014 • • ∞

It’s been well over a year since HgLab 0.1 was first released. Back then, it barely had any functionality at all, let alone any kind of logo.

Now that HgLab has become a full-featured commercial product, one of the things it needed is a nice logo. So, without further ado, please welcome:

June 20, 2014 • • ∞

Back when DVCSes were all new and yet unexplored, one of the touted benefits was the ability to work offline, be it because you are on the plane or because code hosting site went down. While true, you still need to communicate with the outside world, and when your Internet connection gets all cranky, this can become an ordeal of its own.

If you ever used Mercurial over an unreliable connection, you might be wondering why can’t it resume broken clones and why, oh why can’t it do partial pulls and pushes. The reason for the former is purely technical and will be explained shortly, and the latter is simply not the case.

Why Resume is Impossible?

Mercurial communicates changesets by streaming changelog followed by manifest data followed by file data. This minimizes seeking both for client and server, and maximizes on-the-wire compression.

This design has two implications for the viability of “resume”.

First, a clone or pull operation gets interrupted in the middle, odds are that not a single valid changeset was ever transferred (since you might be missing the associated manifest and filelogs) so there’s no consistent point to resume an interrupted operation from.

Second, if a repository gets a new commit between starting a pull and resuming a pull, the contents of a new stream will change at various places, with new changesets, manifests and filelogs appearing in the middle of the stream. This makes it impossible to implement something similar to byte serving, where client can request a portion of a response. Nor is it possible to resume transfer at an arbitrary changeset.

With that in mind, here are all the ways that can help you work around broken connections.

Cloning

Depending on how flaky your connection is, there are two options for performing initial clones.

First, you can try so-called “streaming clones”. These minimize TTFB, but do generally require a bit more data to be transferred.

Here’s how to do a streaming clone:

$ hg clone --uncompressed http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hgsharp/hgsharp

Note that HgLab can enforce this behavior for all compatible clients.

Your second option will be a hg clone –-rev operation, followed by a number of incremental pulls. This behaves similarly to cloning a repository in some distant past and doing occasional updates.

$ hg clone --rev 5 http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hgsharp/hgsharp

Pulling and Pushing

With incremental pulls you can get the entire repository on a changeset-by-changeset basis, thus reducing the amount of data transferred during each operation to an absolute minimum:

$ cd hgsharp $ hg pull --rev 10 http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hgsharp/hgsharp $ hg pull --rev 20 http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hgsharp/hgsharp $ hg pull --rev 21 http://live.hglabhq.com/hg/hgsharp/hgsharp

In true Mercurial spirit (which means, among other things, being consistent throughout the entire system), pushes work very similarly. To get all fancy, here’s a bit of revset-fu to do incremental pushes:

$ hg push --rev "limit(sort(draft(), rev), 2)"

What this does is sends first two draft revisions to a remote repository. Of course, this works just as good:

$ hg push --rev 42

Watch Out

There’s one command to watch out for when you are struggling to keep connected. This command is hg incoming and here’s why you should care.

What hg incoming does is it shows which changesets from the remote repository are not yet in your local one. The way it works is it pulls all the missing parts of history locally, displays the log and then disposes of the bytes it had received. This means that, in case of broken connections, it can very well fail or waste precious bandwidth.

Happy Coding

Hopefully, the next time you find yourself in a situation like this you’ll know exactly what to do to get the work done.

And if you need a reliable and featured Mercurial server and collaboration platform, give HgLab a try.

June 11, 2014 • • ∞

There are a lot of hard things when it comes to Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, off-by-one errors and, as it turns out, agreeing on the actual number of said hard things.

Good names capture the role and function of the concept being named, which, in turn, affects how you or others can understand and reason about stuff. Bad names complicate perception, muddy waters and can often lead one to incorrect conclusions.

One of the illustrations of the phenomenon of a “poorly chosen name” is the concept of “editing history” in the context of a distributed version control systems.

Why History?

In any nontrivial software project, code is read much more often than it’s written (that is, unless you’re writing in Java). Good code and good comments alike make it simpler to understand what the code does and how it does what it does. Version control systems complement actual code and make it simpler to understand why it was written.

Now, just as code, history can be good or bad. Bad history is easy to spot, and we’ve all seen it. Empty commit messages or messages similar to “i dunno, maybe this works” or “Oops, forgot the comma” or “!!!DO NOT CHECKOUT – DOES NOT COMPILE!!!”. Elephant-sized commits affecting dozens of files with no rhyme or reason.

Why Clean History?

History in a version control system should be about logical changes that lead to introduction of a new feature, bugfix, performance tweak. It should not be about “raw” and “unprocessed” changes. It should not be about editing physical bytes. Rather, it should be about why the code was written this particular way.

DVCSes allow us commit early and often, but with great power comes great responsibility. Nobody wants to see how you fix a typo in a variable name or backtrack after programming yourself into a corner. It’s a sign of a good software engineer to pretty up your commit history before unleashing it in public.

Why Edit History?

First of all, let me show what real history rewriting looks like:

Dictatorship aside, here are the reasons why I think “editing history” is a misnomer.

The first one is technical. “Editing” or “rewriting” means taking something and changing it in-place. Yet if you commit -–amend or rebase (either in "stock" Git or with Changeset Evolution enabled in Mercurial) you are not changing history. You create an “alternate” history, in which your commits unfold differently than they originally did. There’s nothing destructive about it, contrary to what the name “editing history” implies.

The second is social. Every so often you come across an article postulating that “Pushing rebases is evil!”, where authors tell their tales of grave horror about what happens when one exploits the superpowers of editing history. This mindset has its roots in limitations of tools; we just need to version control our version control.

What Instead?

I don’t expect to turn the world upside down with the revelation of mine, but I think I’m onto something here.

When you’re cleaning up history before letting the genie out of the bottle and pushing it upstream, you’re not “editing” or “rewriting” history.

You are deciding history.

May 24, 2014 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.6.

Updated Installer, Part 2

Since introducing an updated installer for HgLab 1.5, there was a number of complaints about how cumbersome it was to launch an MSI from the Elevated command prompt. HgLab 1.6 fixes this by wrapping the MSI package in a what is called a “bootstrapper”. A bootstrapper is essentially an EXE files with an embedded manifest which forces UAC dialog to prompt for Elevation from the get-go. This means that HgLab no longer requires any secret incantations to start the installer: it can now be launched just by double-clicking the setup application.

Redesigned Teams

With this release HgLab gets proper Teams. Previously, you could effectively have only one Team per Project. From now on, HgLab supports multiple Teams, each with varying Roles and Members. This allows for greater flexibility and lays the foundation for a much more sophisticated functionality down the road.

HgFlow Support

If you are using HgFlow in your development, HgLab now detects that and does something nice. The “Branches” tab gets replaced with a brand-new “Flow” tab, where you can see all the development streams going on.

The “Flow” tab has all kinds of smarts: it groups substreams according to where they originated from, correctly displays divergence information and has appropriate comparison behavior.

ProjRc Extension Support

ProjRc enables seamless configuration sharing across the organization. With this release, HgLab becomes a ProjRc-compatible server and can be configured to send your environment-specific settings to all the clients. Enable extensions, remap subrepositories, configure defaults and aliases – all within the HgLab web interface.

Grab Bag

There’s also a number of bug fixes and improvements, as usual.

Previously, being a Project Lead had little to no difference as to what you could do in the project. From now on, Project Lead receives unlimited rights within the project: add repositories, manage Teams, add and remove Team Members and Roles. Be careful!

A couple of most prominent bugs were squashed:

“Watch” toggle was not working on certain pages. It now does.

Rendered Markdown files were not linking to the changesets. They now do as well.

Happy Coding

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and get back to writing that awesome code, with HgLab being the center of your collaboration!

April 29, 2014 • • ∞

Mercurial is reaching version 3.0. Code freeze has begun on April 17, which means that Mercurial 3.0 will ship in early May. Here’s an glimpse into what’s going on with Mercurial development, as well as a short overview of upcoming new features, experimental and otherwise.

Changeset Evolution

This feature has been available as an Evolve extension since Mercurial 2.1, but is still under active development and is not enabled by default.

While Mercurial enables distributed version control, Changeset Evolution is a set of features that enables distributed history rewriting. “Distributed” is key here. Currently, there are only partial solutions to the problem of history rewriting. hg rebase and hg histedit are limited in what they can do, have trouble communicating changes with the rest of the team and make it hard (or nearly impossible, depending on which side you’re on) to get previous versions of changesets.

Mercurial itself tracks changes to files. Changeset Evolution enables tracking changes to changesets, recording which of them got deleted or superseded by a new version of the changeset. Obsolescence markers is what enables this functionality. Note that nothing is ever rewritten; obsolete changesets simply are hidden and can always be recovered.

Now, to enable collaborative history rewriting, this information has to be somehow communicated between parties. This is where Bundle2 comes in.

Bundle and Bundle2

Bundle2 implementation is still experimental in Mercurial 3.0 and should be enabled around 3.2 timeframe.

When cloning, pushing and pulling changesets (and running hg bundle ), Mercurial exchanges changesets in the format called Bundle. Although battle-tested and extremely reliable, this format has a number of shortcomings:

Cannot be easily extended to transfer new types of payloads

Does not support exchanges of bookmarks and phase boundaries

Does not support more advanced delta-compression algorithms

Is only used for unidirectional communications

Bundle2 will be the replacement for current Bundle format, featuring better compression, extensibility and bidirectional communication. Additionally, it will significantly decrease the number of HTTP requests sent to the Mercurial server when performing pushes and pulls, because what currently requires separate trips to the server (get bundle, get bookmarks, get phase markers) will be shipped to the client in one go.

New Features

HTTP Authentication Improvements

Previously, Mercurial was not very smart about HTTP authentication, very much resembling a goldfish: it would try to connect to the server, receive 401, get authentication information (either from the user or from Keyring) and retry the request, authenticated, only to forget to authenticate the next request. This behavior was particularly bothersome for pushes, when all the effort of transmitting a potentially large bundle was wasted because the request was unauthenticated in the first place:

GET /hg/server?cmd=capabilities HTTP/1.1 401 260 - mercurial/proto-1.0 GET /hg/server?cmd=capabilities HTTP/1.1 200 147 - mercurial/proto-1.0 POST /hg/server?cmd=unbundle HTTP/1.1 401 260 - mercurial/proto-1.0 POST /hg/server?cmd=unbundle HTTP/1.1 200 42 - mercurial/proto-1.0

This is going to change in 3.0: Mercurial will remember that it needs to be authenticating and will not be trying to break into a password-protected door:

GET /hg/server?cmd=capabilities HTTP/1.1 401 260 - mercurial/proto-1.0 GET /hg/server?cmd=capabilities HTTP/1.1 200 147 - mercurial/proto-1.0 POST /hg/server?cmd=unbundle HTTP/1.1 200 42 - mercurial/proto-1.0

Usability Improvements

When executing hg push on a newly created repository, Mercurial errored out with a rather cryptic message:

$ hg init $ hg ci -m "initial commit" –A # assuming there were changes $ hg push pushing to default-push abort: repository default-push

Those familiar with Mercurial will immediately know what’s wrong here. Those who aren’t, however, are left to their own Google-foo. In 3.0, Mercurial will get a bit more helpful and offer to consult an exact section of a super-helpful built-in help.

More detailed help comes from yet another angle, future-proofing existing Mercurial.

hg config

Mercurial will get a new command, called hg config . It can be used in two flavors: running hg config will print names and values for all configuration items. Running hg config --edit will launch a configured editor to tweak a user-level configuration file. With --local switch you’ll be editing a repository-level configuration file, and with --global you’ll be editing a system-level configuration file.

April 29, 2014 • • ∞

HgLab, a behind-the-firewall self-hosted Mercurial server, source control management system and code collaboration platform, has been updated to version 1.5.

Goodbye, Microsoft Windows Server 2003

There were several reasons for dropping support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003. First, it is already on the Extended Support which is rapidly nearing its end in 2015. Second, very few HgLab customers are actually using it (if you are one of them, please do contact HgLab Support – there’s no need to worry).

The third, and the most important reason, is that I just could not deliver the desired installation experience. MSI and WiX make it nearly impossible to achieve what I was envisioning on Windows Server 2003, so something had to give.

Updated HgLab Installer

From now on, HgLab Installer will be the one responsible for creating and managing AppPools, Web Sites and Web Applications in the Microsoft Internet Information Services. This means that you won’t have to manually configure anything in the Internet Information Services Manager.

Read more about installing and upgrading HgLab.

Updated Documentation

HgLab Documentation has been given the attention it deserved. Head over to see the Getting Started Guide, check out Prerequisites and follow the detailed Installation Guide. User Guide contains a lot of useful bits on how to use each and every feature of HgLab, and Administrator Guide provides all the information required for managing the HgLab installation.

Breaking Changes

With HgLab 1.5, the only users who will be able to use HgLab are the ones who have Collaboration permission and System Administrators.

Refer to Security Model to see how Users, Groups, Roles and Permissions play together.

New Features

This release also features:

Redesigned Email settings in Administration Area with global "Outbound Email" toggle

Significantly more reliable email notifications

Database access performance optimizations

Activity Stream (as well as Activity Atom Feed) now follows behavior outlined in the documentation

Happy Coding

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and stay tuned.

March 25, 2014 • • ∞

Welcome HgLab 1.4. This release features an exciting new feature called “LAN Optimizations”

LAN Optimizations

Previously, cloning an entire Mercurial repository (55 Mb, almost 21,000 changesets) took a bit over a minute (1:16, to be exact):

Now watch this:

Fifteen seconds. That’s almost 5x speed increase for initial clones. Impressive, isn’t it? What’s even better is that no configuration tweaking is required on the client side. HgLab itself enforces this behavior, with (compatible) Mercurial clients silently obeying.

Of course, nothing in the computing world comes for free, and this is no exception. When you are enabling LAN Optimizations, you’re trading speed for bandwidth. In corporate scenarios bandwidth is practically unlimited, so enabling LAN Optimizations for, well, LANs is a no-brainer. Additionally, it saves a bit of CPU cycles since HgLab doesn’t have to do all the complex computations involved in building a bundle.

How Does It Work?

For as long as I can remember (since 2006, actually, but that’s like 50 years Internet-time), Mercurial had an unfortunately named --uncompressed switch for clone command:

hg clone http://anton.gogolev@live.hglabhq.com/hg/mercurial/hg --uncompressed

With this flag set, Mercurial client asks server to perform for a what is called a “streamed clone”, when server just takes all the revlogs from the repository, glues them all together and streams the entire thing back to the client. With LAN Optimizations enabled, HgLab effectively enforces this streaming behavior even when client doesn’t explicitly asks for it.

Streaming clones, however, are not available if you’re doing any of the fancy-pants cloning, like hg clone --rev , hg clone -–branch or hg clone http://...#revision-or-branch-or-tag . This is by design, because when you’re cloning only a subset of history, there’s no reason to transfer the repository in its entirety, so Mercurial has to revert to a traditional cloning behavior.

How to Enable?

Just check the checkbox. Go to Administration, then to Repositories and enable “LAN Optimizations”. No reboot, no restart. Changes are effective immediately:

Stay Tuned

This release also has a number of minor User Interface tweaks, and discovering them is left as an exercise to the reader.

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and stay tuned.

Happy coding!

March 11, 2014 • • ∞

HgLab 1.3 has just been shipped. With this release HgLab gets revamped security model as well as several new features, with most prominent being Commit Approvals and Source Code Archve Downloads.

Below are the highlights of HgLab 1.3.

Activity Atom Feeds

There’s now yet another way to track of All Things HgLab: Atom feeds allow you to get updates directly in your favorite RSS reader. Click the Feed link and you’ll get either a full feed for all your watched projects or for a specific project.

Of course, feeds support Auto Discovery.

Source Code Archive Downloads

Previously, the only way to get source code from a repository was to clone it with Mercurial. While being appropriate for traditional collaboration models, this was a big roadblock in certain scenarios.

See this tiny button?

It allows you to abandon that version-controlled distributed universe and download a plain old ZIP file with all the source code for a particular changeset, branch or tag.

Commit Approvals

HgLab now has a light-weight approval process that allows teammates to Approve a commit, essentially green-lighting changes.

Later, when browsing commits, HgLab displays the total number approvals for a particular commit as either a gray or a green circle. Gray badge shows how many reviewers have approved a particular change. The badge turns green for the commits that were reviewed and approved by you.

Redesigned Security Model

There is a number of changes to the Security Model in this release.

Anonymous is No More

Previously, “Anonymous” user was used to grant public access to a project. This is now replaced by an independent checkbox in Project Settings.

System Permissions and Role Permissions

HgLab now splits permissions into two silos: System Permissions and Role Permissions.

System Permissions are assigned to Groups and are (and will be) used to restrict access to system-wide areas of functionality, such as ability to manage Projects.

Role Permissions are, as the name implies, assigned to Roles (which are in turn granted via Team Membership) and are used to restrict narrower areas of functionality, such as ability to manage Repositories and Teams.

User Experience

Neverending quest for great UI and UX continues. This release features expandable commit messages (see the little ellipsis in Message column in Commits tab), slightly redesigned Compare page and Diffstats and improved language detection for code highlighting.

Stay Tuned

That’s it for this release, but there’s a lot in the works.

Grab yourself a copy, request an evaluation license and stay tuned.

Happy coding!

January 17, 2014 • • ∞

Yesterday it was announced that Microsoft will not be adding support for Mercurial to Team Foundation Server.

I see two reasons why this might have happened.

Mercurial Core and Licensing Issues

There is a way of comparing and contrasting Git and Mercurial I came up with recently. Git is simple on the inside (with its ingeniously simple and elegant storage format) but overly complex on the outside (with its cumbersome and often illogical CLI). Mercurial, on the other hand, is quite complex on the inside, but has a refreshingly simple CLI.

This observation has far-reaching consequences.

Git, with its simple and-well documented storage format, makes it easy to do a clean room implementation of Git Core in any programming language. Clean room implementation effectively frees authors of GPL restrictions and allows this code to be used in any closed-source product.

Even if not for a possibility of a clean room implementation, libgit2 (which is what Microsoft uses internally) is licensed under GPLv2 with Linking Exception, so incorporating this library into Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server is a no-brainer technology-wise and licensing-wise.

When it comes to Mercurial, matters are significantly more complex here. Low-level Mercurial internals are documented only to a degree, which makes it impossible to implement Mercurial Core using clean room approach. This means that any reimplementation will automatically be treated as derivative work, which forces it to be licensed under GPL, which in turn prohibits usage of the library in a closed-source commercial project.

It’s unclear to me if this issue can be resolved at all. If Microsoft eventually decides to add support for Mercurial to Team Foundation Server, there are several options for them here:

Use the Command Server approach, which is the only legal option for the time being, albeit overly cumbersome.

Reach an agreement with Matt Mackall, Facebook and numerous Mercurial contributors so that Microsoft will be granted a permission to use Mercurial under different license.

Suffer through a complete rewrite of Mercurial without even attempting to take a peek into original source code.

Git Popularity

Comparing absolute numbers of developers using either VCS, Git is indeed more popular than Mercurial, so with Team Foundation Server integrating with Git Microsoft caters for a larger target audience.

Or it does not?

In absolute numbers Git is more popular, but Mercurial is arguably more popular in a corporate world and even more so in companies that are building on Microsoft stack and are using Microsoft products, client and server alike. It’s unlikely that the OSS community is the target market for either Visual Studio or Team Foundation System.

Mercurial Plugin Ecosystem

This is a minor point that is unlikely to have influence Microsoft’s decision, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless.

Mercurial plugin ecosystem is richer than that of Git and, thanks to a nicer API of Mercurial, its extensions seamlessly integrate into Mercurial proper. Most notably, hg-git is significantly simpler to install than its’ Git counterpart, git-remote-hg, with latter being less feature-rich.

Again, this alone is unlikely to have had any significant weight in a decision to decline the UserVoice request, but it might have left Microsoft thinking that this will somehow satisfy us Mercurial aficionados.

All in all, this is an unfortunate piece of news for several thousand developers and several hundred companies. Let’s see what the future holds.

January 14, 2014 • • ∞

It’s been over a month since HgLab 1.0 and it’s high time for an update, so here goes: HgLab 1.1.

Inline Commit Discussions

Up until now HgLab only had commit-level discussions. Welcome inline commit discussions:

Discuss with style: inline discussions support Markdown, Emojis and @mentions.

Virtual @ Bookmark

Some teams prefer their mainline branch to be something other than default . Therein lies a catch: newly cloned repositories gets automatically updated to default branch and commits often end up in the wrong place.

To solve that, Mercurial 2.4 introduced a special bookmark called @ to which all fresh clones get updated to. Where does HgLab come into play here? Well, if you change your Mainline Branch to something other than default (and you don’t happen to have @ bookmark already), HgLab will manage this oh-so-special marker by itself, allowing you to always be on the correct path.

Starred Repositories

Your favorite repositories are now even more accessible. Clicking that tiny arrow opens up a handy list of all your Starred Repositories.

Language Statistics

Each Repository page now comes with a nice language statistics graph which shows the language breakdown.

Performance Improvements and More

Speed is a feature, and I continue to work on improving HgLab performance. This release is no exception: HgLab became much smarter about caching and cache invalidation.

These are the big features in this release, but there’s also a lot of small fixes that contribute to the overall experience: updated icons and .hgignore templates, improved language detection, numerous UI and UX fixes, tweaks and improvements.

Long Road Ahead

These 19 branches you saw on the screenshots above – they are there for a reason. This is just the beginning, and will be many new and exciting features. Stay tuned!

November 26, 2013 • • ∞

Today I’m officially launching HgLab 1.0, a self-hosted, behind-the-firewall Mercurial server and source control management system for Windows.

For many companies, hosting an internal source control server and maintaining access to repositories can be a difficult and time consuming process. Now, you can focus on building great software and let HgLab take care of your repository management.

Built for Windows

Mercurial has always had excellent Windows support on the client-side. With HgLab, server-side gets equally great treatment. HgLab runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and above and requires only Microsoft .NET Framework, Internet Information Services and Microsoft SQL Server: everything you are already familiar with.

What’s more, HgLab integrates seamlessly with your LDAP server and provides all the benefits of centralized user and group management.

Centralized Repository Management

HgLab delivers you a central, secure solution to create and manage distributed repositories, on your own servers. Developers can trust that they will find the latest official version of a project. Managers can trust that users’ access to code is appropriate for their role, and assigned with minimal administrative overhead.

Meet HgLab

This is really big: HgLab has now grown out of its beta pants and turned into a mature, real-world application. Over the past 18 months HgLab has come a long way, but there’s an even longer road ahead. My goal with HgLab is to build state-of-the art code collaboration platform for Mercurial and Windows, and version 1.0 is just the beginning.

Head over to Features page to see what HgLab has to offer. Download the installer, request an Evaluation License and be up and running in no time.

November 21, 2013 • • ∞

About 18 months ago I made a first commit to the HgLab repository. From the get-go I had several major goals in mind:

Build the Mercurial Server for Windows: minimum dependencies, cleanest and simplest possible installation and upgrade experience

Make managing Mercurial repositories less of a hassle

Bring all the cool code collaboration tools to Mercurial and Windows

After 1.5 years in the making, I think I have first two points covered.

HgLab runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and above and only requires .NET Framework, Internet Information Services and (for now) Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (Express edition or any later version will do just fine); it’s trivial to install and upgrade.

On the management side HgLab has a lot to offer too: web-based interface for managing Mercurial repositories and users, integration with ActiveDirectory, roles, groups and teams and much much more.

All in all, it’s been a bumpy ride and I have quite a few war stories to tell about IIS, WiX and .NET Framework. Yet, fast-forward 1 300 commits — and HgLab 1.0 is here.

With this release HgLab will be turning into a commercial product. It’s here for the long haul and I believe it has a much bigger chance of of succeeding if it has people committed to doing the not-so-fun things (as opposed to doing “fun” features), producing a very useful, high-quality and reliable product that you can trust your source code with and that use to do what you do best: build awesome software.

Installer

From now on, HgLab will be distributed as an MSI package. This is a much cleaner approach compared to what was available previously. Upgrades are handled automatically, so no more hand-picking which files to delete and which to leave out.

One thing to note here. HgLab itself is compiled as AnyCPU and actually runs as 64-bit process on 64-bit systems, but since there is no such a thing as as “AnyCPU MSI” and since I didn’t want to complicate things by offering two versions of installer, there will only be an x86 MSI.

Licensing and Pricing

HgLab will be licensed under a perpetual licensing model. Your license key allows you to use any release of HgLab that was available when you purchased the key, as well as any future releases (bug fixes, enhancements, new features, etc.) for 12 months from the date of purchase. After that 12 months, you can continue to use the version you have forever, or you can choose to renew your license key for another 12 months to continue getting updates.

There will be four licensing tiers for HgLab (plus a full-featured 45-day evaluation license), all providing the same functionality but differing in the number of users who will be able to access the system.

Startup: Up to 5 users, $ 29

Team: Up to 20 users, $ 349

Corporate: Up to 50 users, $ 849

Enterprise: Unlimited users plus access to full source code, $ 1 949

Evaluation: Unlimited users, 45 day evaluation

Thank you

HgLab has now matured into a real application, and it's time for the beta period to come to an end. The current 0.4.x series of releases will be the last beta releases while I tidy a few things up. On November 25th I'll release the final 1.0 version, and this will be a farewell to the beta label.

To everyone who participated in the beta, you have my sincere thanks for helping to make HgLab the product it is today!

October 24, 2013 • • ∞

Last time I mentioned:

…more work related to improving stability, performance and reliability

What I didn’t mention was security. How thoughtful of me.

There is a regression introduced in 0.4.4 while fixing #345, which results in all projects being available to an Anonymous user as long as there is at least one project where an Anonymous was added as a Team member.

HgLab 0.4.5 fixes this issue.