Mercurial from MPLAB: what are the very first steps?

Question

I have never used a version control system before, and am rather confused about the very first steps. In a personal PIC/MPLAB programming project, under Linux, (no one else involved), with a single source code file that will go through several development stages as I add and verify features, I want to keep the set of "working so far" source code files, and Mercurial looks like a very good way to do it, preferable to my usual, and error prone, ad hoc approach.

So I have a very elementary question: I have installed Mercurial and accessed it from within MPLAB, and I have created a file

"/home/Harry/MPLABXProjects/flash675.X/.hg"

Please, I want to know 1) what to do next to start it off and 2) is it going to be obvious how I go about using the Mercurial system from then on? I find the documentation confusing on this very basic point.

(Yes, the first stage is just flash an LED, using a TMR0 interrupt, and that is working ok; I will then use that as a "prover" that the hardware is still working when I get to the inevitable "nothing happening" situations. I am building an ammeter for a p.s.u. with a Hall effect transducer, so I later will be adding an 8-LED serial display for debugging, a 12-bit A/D converter and a 4-digit 7-segment display, all using I2C serial control)

Answer 1

Good answer to this question will have the size of a full tutorial. There are many existing tutorials in the Internet, http://hginit.com/ for example. You can walk through it but I suggest to look at Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (link). The beginning of the book has a form of tutorial so it won't take a lot of time too.

The best helpers in learning is practice and experiments. Just don't forget to keep clean copy of your repository. It will save you when you break one of repository's clones. Here is a quick instruction so my answer won't be too philosophical.

1. Create your "prover". For example, it is a file called prover.c.
2. Look what you have: hg status. You will see your file with question mark. It means this file isn't under version control.
3. Add it to repository: hg add prover.c. Doing this you register your file in repository. After you commit Mercurial will start tracking changes in this file.
4. Commit: hd commit. You will be asked to enter a commit message. Good comments will help to discover a history in future.

That's it. If you change prover.c now and run hg status you will see that Mercurial knows about all changes. You can ask Mercurial to show changes by run hg diff.