I’m super excited to announce that Beanstalk’s Mercurial support is out of private beta. We’re looking forward to supporting our Hg users. We’re also preparing to launch support for Subversion 1.7 next weekend which is going to bring a lot of great performance boosts.

Read on! — Chris Nagele and the Wildbit Team

Hello, Mercurial

We launched Mercurial (a.k.a. Hg) support in a closed Beta on Feb 16th. Since then we’ve learned quite a bit and feel it’s ready for you.

We built Beanstalk to make your development process more effective, and part of that is making sure we give you options to best fit your team and your projects. There are different types of version control systems, each with different strengths and weaknesses. We want to give you all of the best options so you can pick what works best for you.

We really like Mercurial and are thrilled to now offer it as a choice when creating a new repository in Beanstalk. It’s a great distributed version control system that is used and loved by many developers. It has many similar features as git, but may be better suited for your team and your workflow.

We encourage you to use the version control system that works best for your team, and works well for a particular project. It’s not uncommon for us to see Git and SVN repos within the same account, and we expect the same to be true for Mercurial. Only you know what option is best, and now we’ve given you more to choose from.

Coming Soon: Deployments for Mercurial

At the moment, Deployments are disabled for Mercurial repositories. We’re working to get these going but are anxiously awaiting feedback to make sure they work well with the nuances of Hg. Otherwise, all Beanstalk features are available immediately. For the curious, we’re currently running Mercurial 2.1.2.

We’re looking forward to improving how we support Mercurial integration as we get more feedback. Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the workflow work better for you.

Upgrading to SVN 1.7

For those of you who use Subversion, you may know that a new version was released in October. As with most releases, we usually wait until issues and major bugs are fixed. Next weekend we will be upgrading our servers to 1.7. We’ve been testing internally and it promises tremendous performance boosts, more than doubling checkout speeds!

The upgrade will have no effect on your repository unless you choose to upgrade your local machine to 1.7. You can keep using a 1.6 client or a 1.6 working copy. If you decide to install 1.7 locally, you can upgrade your working copies by running svn upgrade. Please read the release notes for more details. To install 1.7 for Mac OS X, follow our help article. For Windows, download the installer from Collabnet. You may also upgrade your favorite client such as Cornerstone or TortoiseSVN.

Fresh from the Beanstalk blog:

• Revising the Deployments Redesign
• Why our blame tool was slow, and how I fixed it in an evening
• New simple checkout and clone buttons for Cornerstone and Tower