We are happy to announce the availability of MercurialEclipse 1.7.1, the latest version of the Mercurial Distributed Version Control plugin for the Eclipse IDE.

Effectively managing multiple concurrent branches is a crucial part of Distributed Version Control. Multiple branches also cause a lot of trouble at the same time. Branching, merging and resolving conflicts become daily routine tasks in DVCS, but users coming from the Centralized VCS space (typically refugees of Subversion, CVS, Perforce, ClearCase and co) are mostly unfamiliar with these operations and their consequences. MercurialEclipse 1.7.1 is a big help for them.

MercurialEclipse 1.7.1 focuses on improving usability in merge conflict situations: it gives better support for rebase, (automatic) merge, manual merge resolution and undo. MercurialEclipse 1.7.1 is also a major step forward in terms of performance, which is immediately noticeable at very large projects and project portfolios.

Version highlights:
* New "Undo" menu in Synchronize View: "Rollback" and "Backout".
* Totally overhauled handling of multiple heads: "Rebase" and "Merge" are offered automatically when doing a "Pull and Update" that would result in multiple heads.
* Tree view of changed files in Synchronized View. File hierarchies are automatically displayed in "compressed folders" mode.
* MercurialEclipse was updated to leverage Mercurial 1.6. Thus, Mercurial 1.6 is the minimum required version from MercurialEclipse 1.7.1. (You might need to upgrade your Mercurial installation separately.)
* New menu item "Open Corresponding Task" in Synchronized View (both for incoming and outgoing change sets). This helps to associate your changes with specific tasks, so you can always know what task or bug or requirement triggered a change. Traceability is great.
We suggest you giving the Mylyn task framework a try if haven't tried yet. Important link: codeBeamer Eclipse Studio is the bridge between Mylyn task repositories and Mercurial.
* Performance improvements for repositories with tens of thousands of files and change sets.
* Performance improvements when multiple projects are synchronized with the same set of repositories. The plugin effectivel reuse synchronization results between projects.

Plus, as always, there is a lots of bugfixes and smaller improvements that are not included in this list. We recommending checking the full list of changes here: MercurialEclipse 1.7 and 1.7.1 issues

We recommend upgrading to 1.7.1 to the users of all earlier MercurialEclipse versions: http://javaforge.com/wiki/72561