This week's release includes an all-new "Source/hg" tool which brings Mercurial into the family of fully supported repositories.
Mercurial (hg) is a distributed code repository system with good support for branching and merging, which is ALSO easy to use, and easy to use on Windows. Learn more about the Mercurial project here.
Assembla's new Source/hg tool is available in a full featured workspace, or from the Admin/Tool page in an existing project. Plus we are extending our free private unlimited-user repository offer to Mercurial users, here.
The new Mercurial tool includes many of the features that make our svn and git repositories great. You can easily add and remove users, manage public and private repositories, link commits to tickets, "View as Web page", fork and submit patch requests.
We have supported Mercurial users for several years with reliable Trac+Mercurial hosting. We won't offer the Trac configuration for new projects. The integrated Source/hg tool has many advantages.
Now we have three fully supported repository types, each supporting a different kind of coding workflow. Subversion is still the most popular. To understand the strength of Subversion, read my post on "Why subversion does not suck". Git works much better with branches, and git is a toolkit that can support a huge number of workflows, including the popular "social coding", and our soon-to-be released Gerrit on-demand. But, it can be confusing. Mercurial gives you effective branching and merging with the promise that "most tasks simply work on the first try and without requiring arcane knowledge."
The Assembla app is tasked with collecting code, discussions, documentation, and other intellectual property into one workspace, so that all of your network-connected team members can find it when they need it. That means that we need repositories that work for you, your clients, the other guys in your company who are now working on different projects, the new guy, and the outsourced maintenance team. That's why we support multiple repository types, with different workflows.
It's also our job to recommend a streamlined workflow for each type of repository. We'll be posting more about that, and more about how to fit a repository to your team. Until then, please give us your feedback on this initial release of the Mercurial tool. I thank Vladimir Zdorovenco for his work on this tool.