Setting up Mercurial in your home directory:

 Note: Debian fails to include bits of distutils, you'll need
 python-dev to install. Alternately, shove everything somewhere in
 your path.

 $ tar xvzf mercurial-<ver>.tar.gz
 $ cd mercurial-<ver>
 $ python setup.py install --home ~
 $ export PYTHONPATH=${HOME}/lib/python  # add this to your .bashrc
 $ export HGMERGE=tkmerge                # customize this
 $ hg                                    # test installation, show help

 If you get complaints about missing modules, you probably haven't set
 PYTHONPATH correctly.

 You may also want to install psyco, the python specializing compiler.
 It makes commits more than twice as fast. The relevant Debian package
 is python-psyco

Setting up a Mercurial project:

 $ cd linux/
 $ hg init         # creates .hg
 $ hg status       # show changes between repo and working dir
 $ hg diff         # generate a unidiff
 $ hg addremove    # add all unknown files and remove all missing files
 $ hg commit       # commit all changes, edit changelog entry

 Mercurial will look for a file named .hgignore in the root of your
 repository contains a set of regular expressions to ignore in file
 paths.

Mercurial commands:

 $ hg history          # show changesets
 $ hg log Makefile     # show commits per file
 $ hg checkout         # check out the tip revision
 $ hg checkout <hash>  # check out a specified changeset
 $ hg add foo          # add a new file for the next commit
 $ hg remove bar       # mark a file as removed
 $ hg verify           # check repo integrity

Branching and merging:

 $ cd ..
 $ mkdir linux-work
 $ cd linux-work
 $ hg branch ../linux        # create a new branch
 $ hg checkout               # populate the working directory
 $ <make changes>
 $ hg commit
 $ cd ../linux
 $ hg merge ../linux-work    # pull changesets from linux-work

Importing patches:

 Fast:
 $ patch < ../p/foo.patch
 $ hg addremove
 $ hg commit

 Faster:
 $ patch < ../p/foo.patch
 $ hg commit `lsdiff -p1 ../p/foo.patch`

 Fastest:
 $ cat ../p/patchlist | xargs hg import -p1 -b ../p 

Network support (highly experimental):

 # pull the self-hosting hg repo
 foo$ hg init
 foo$ hg merge http://selenic.com/hg/
 foo$ hg checkout  # hg co works too

 # export your .hg directory as a directory on your webserver
 foo$ ln -s .hg ~/public_html/hg-linux 

 # merge changes from a remote machine
 bar$ hg merge http://foo/~user/hg-linux

 This is just a proof of concept of grabbing byte ranges, and is not
 expected to perform well. Fixing this needs some pipelining to reduce
 the number of round trips. See zsync for a similar approach.

 Another approach which does perform well right now is to use rsync.
 Simply rsync the remote repo to a read-only local copy and then do a
 local pull.