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Resources: db48x, ted
== Mercurial history browsing ==
We're just starting to use an exciting new [http://betterexplained.com/articles/intro-to-distributed-version-control-illustrated/ distributed version control] tool: [http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mercurial Mercurial].
One of the exciting things about Mercurial is that the history—the list of all the changes that have ever been checked in—is not linear. It frequently has ''branches'' and ''merges''. This is actually a good, important feature, as you know if you've read a little about distributed version control. The downside is that the history becomes a maze of twisty little passages. [http://office.smedbergs.us/viewer/index.xhtml#mozilla-central:acb5456539c668d3ec0ec755dd3b64ddb56363d2 Benjamin Smedberg's demo] shows the history of a repository with lots of merges (each box is a check-in; you can click on the boxes to move around).
There have been a couple attempts at showing history in an intuitive, graphical way. Mercurial comes with a web UI for browsing the repository, including history ([http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/index.cgi/log/13540 here's what it looks like]). It also comes with an "hg glog" extension that draws history as ASCII art, and an "hg view" extension that does roughly the same thing with a little GUI. Sadly, none of these applications qualifies as ''awesome''.
Your mission is to rectify this sad situation by writing an awesome browser-based UI for navigating Mercurial repository history.
Resources: jorendorff, bsmedberg