OGRE has now switched its main repository hosting from Subversion to Mercurial, a distributed revision control system (DVCS). From now on, if you want to keep up with the latest code that OGRE developers are working on, you need to be using Mercurial too.

We switched to a DVCS because it gives us far more flexibility when dealing with distributed development, since DVCSs allow local commits for all users and are far more sophisticated at merging disparate development streams, including those which have been ‘disconnected’ from the official version for a while (e.g. user contributions which take a while to develop). Also, users outside the team can collaborate with each other far more easily to create joint patches. For details on how to get the OGRE code from Mercurial, please see our Mercurial developer page.

We chose Mercurial as our DVCS because it supports all developer’s operating systems equally (Windows, OS X, Linux), and because it’s easy to learn when you come from other systems (such as Subversion). We chose BitBucket to host our repository because they allow users to create their own hosted forks of OGRE easily, which encourages collaboration on more complex patches out in the community at large. We’ll still be using Sourceforge for other things such as file releases.

As well as following the new repository direct, you can also follow development as it happens via the following:

We’re excited about the extra flexibility using Mercurial will bring going forward, and encourage you to try it out!