[ANN] Initial public release of TortoiseHg

[Steve Borho]

I'm pleased to announce the first public release of TortoiseHg, congrats
to TK Soh and to all the contributors.  

For this release, TortoiseHg has been packaged as an all-in-one Windows
installer that provides a complete Mercurial client.  In the future it
will also be released as a standalone package, and as a source package
suitable for use with the NSI Mercurial installer.

This TortoiseHg installer is built upon my "Batteries Included"
installer and thus comes with a complete suite of GUI tools and
extensions.  While TortoiseHg provides base functionality for doing
commits, browsing your working directory, and viewing your repository
history, it also allows you to select external tools for those purposes.
This installer configures TortoiseHg to use the bundled hgk, qct, and
gtools dialogs in lieu of their internal analogs.  This functionality is
configured via a [tortoisehg] section of Mercurial.ini, thus users can
override those selections with their own choices should they prefer
hgview over hgk, etc.

Important Caveats:

* The windows shell functionality does not work properly on Vista.
There is a known problem in the pywin32 extensions related to
permissions that should be fixed in the next pywin32 release.  It is
strongly suggested that you stick with the base "Batteries Included"
win32extras installer on Vista machines at this time.

* Since this installer is registering a shell extension, it must
reboot when it's finished.  Similarly, it must reboot again when the
package is un-installed.

* Dialogs have a tendency to pop up behind the explorer window, be on
the lookout for hiding dialogs.  Many of the external dialogs will not
refresh the overlay icons when they exit, so you must hit F5 at times.

* We want feedback.  Especially, we would like people's views on the
layout of the context menus.  Please file bug reports and feature
requests at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=199155

* Patches and comments are always welcome at
tortoisehg-develop at lists.sourceforge.net


URLS:
Main Web Site:
http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/

Downloads:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=188871&package_id=243861

Mercurial-feac5b0bf9ba-TortoiseHg-1f161ca182e3.exe -TortoiseHg Installer
Mercurial-feac5b0bf9ba-win32extras-p1.exe          -BI Installer

PS: I've also released a new BI installer today that re-introduces
kdiff3, updates hgmerge.py so it can run without an interactive console,
and fixes a number of bugs introduced in the November release.

PPS: The format for configuring hgmerge.py via Mercurial.ini has changed
in order to allow per-file-extension tool selection.  Rather than using
ui.merge_tools, it defines it's own [hgmerge] section.  See the shipped
Mercurial.ini for examples.

-- 
Steve Borho (steve at borho.org)
http://www.borho.org/~steve/steve.asc
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