Mercurial_ The Definitive Guide - Bryan O'Sullivan [3]
This book is licensed under the Open Publication License.
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
O'Reilly Media
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Preface
Technical Storytelling
A few years ago, when I wanted to explain why I believed that distributed revision control was important, the field was so new that there was almost no published literature to refer people to.
Although at that time I was working on the internals of Mercurial itself, I switched to writing this book because that seemed like the most effective way to help the software to reach a wide audience, along with the idea that revision control ought to be distributed in nature. I am publishing this online under a liberal license for the same reason: to get the word out.
There’s a familiar rhythm to a good software book that closely resembles telling a story: What is this thing? Why does it matter? How will it help me? How do I use it? In this book, I try to answer those questions for distributed revision control in general, and for Mercurial in particular.
Thank You for Supporting Mercurial
By purchasing a copy of this book, you are supporting the continued development and freedom of Mercurial in particular, and of open source and free software in general. O’Reilly Media and I are donating my royalties on the sales of this book to the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides clerical and legal support to Mercurial and a number of other prominent and worthy open source software projects.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.
Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, commands, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.
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Warning
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Using Code Examples
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Mercurial: The Definitive Guide by Bryan O’Sullivan. Copyright 2009 Bryan O’Sullivan, 978-0-596-80067-3.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at permissions@oreilly.com.
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