Is it possible/recommended to install TortoiseHg if (a newer) mercurial is already installed?

Question

I have searched the docs and it is still unclear to me if I can install TortoiseHG on a machine where mercurial is already installed. In particular I find in the FAQs that the installer bundles Mercurial. But, on the other hand, to build from source requires (obviously) to hg clone the repository.

My problem is that I installed the latest release of Mercurial (which, as of Nov 2012, is 2.4) while all the currently available THG releases refer to previous versions. For instance,

2012-10-01: TortoiseHg 2.5.1 (with Mercurial 2.3.2) released

as can be seen in the news as of Nov 2012.

What is the best course of action? I have currently installed hg 2.4 and I have already created a local repository, which I am handling via the command line. It is possible that I missed the relevant information online: please point it out to me if that is the case.

Answer 1

The Mercurial crew is extremely diligent about being backward compatible; Take a look at the release notes to see if there's anything in 2.4 that might make a difference for a Mercurial 2.3.x client to a 2.4 repository. The TortoiseHg crew has been quite good about keeping up with newer releases of Mercurial, so you won't have to wait too long to see a new release of TortoiseHg based on Mercurial 2.4.

Answer 2

The best course of action is to just keep things as they are. According to Mercurial 2.4's upgrade notes, only bookmark handling has been incompatibly changed since 2.3. So, the repositories should still be compatible between versions.

In future upgrades, you'd better wait for TortoiseHg to catch on the latest release of Mercurial. Unless you need a security update or a critical fix, there are few reasons to upgrade so diligently. Moreover, if you use the GUI regularly, there's even less need to upgrade Mercurial separately.