Introduction to Mercurial
Mercurial is a distributed source control
management tool similar to Git and
Bazaar. Mercurial
is written in Python and is used by projects
such as Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run
some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated
since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Package Information
Download (HTTP): https://www.mercurial-scm.org/release/mercurial-6.6.tar.gz
Download MD5 sum: f0aba4daa00b91d9dcd3e168b80d46fb
Download size: 7.9 MB
Estimated disk space required: 115 MB (with docs, add 1.5 GB for tests)
Estimated build time: 0.5 SBU (with docs; add 18 SBU for tests; both using parallelism=8)
Mercurial Dependencies
Optional
docutils-0.20.1
(required to build the documentation),
git-2.43.0,
GPGME-1.23.1 (with Python bindings),
OpenSSH-9.5p1
(runtime, to access ssh://... repositories),
Pygments-2.17.1,
rustc-1.74.0 (see rust/README.rst and rust/rhg/README.md),
Subversion-1.14.2 (with Python bindings),
Bazaar,
CVS,
pyflakes,
pyOpenSSL, and
re2
Installation of Mercurial
Build Mercurial by issuing the following
command:
make build
To build the documentation (requires docutils-0.20.1), issue:
make doc
If you wish to run the tests, the rust tests must be removed as they are
currently broken due to syntax errors. To do this, issue:
sed -i '138,142d' Makefile
To run the test suite, issue:
TESTFLAGS="-j<N> --tmpdir tmp" make check
where <N> is an integer between one
and the number of ( processor X threads ), inclusive. Several tests
fail because some error messages have changed in Python or
some deprecation warnings are printed that were not present when the
test was designed.
In order to
investigate any apparently failing tests, you may use the
run-tests.py script. To see the almost forty switches,
some of them very useful, issue tests/run-tests.py
--help. Running the following commands, you will execute only
the tests that failed before:
pushd tests &&
rm -rf tmp &&
./run-tests.py --tmpdir tmp test-gpg.t
popd
Normally, the previous failures will be reproducible. However, if
you add the switch --debug before
--tmpdir, and run the tests again, some failures may
disappear, which is a problem with the test suite. If this happens,
there will be no more of these failures even if you do not pass the
--debug switch again.
An interesting switch is --time, which will generate a
table of all the executed tests and their respective start, end, user,
system and real times once the tests are complete. Note that these
switches may be used with make check by including
them in the TESTFLAGS environment variable.
Install Mercurial by running the following
command (as root):
make PREFIX=/usr install-bin
If you built the documentation, install it by running the following
command (as root):
make PREFIX=/usr install-doc
After installation, two very quick and simple tests should run
correctly. The first one needs some configuration:
cat >> ~/.hgrc << "EOF"
[ui]
username = <user_name> <user@mail>
EOF
where you must replace <user_name> and <your@mail> (mail
is optional and can be omitted). With the user identity defined, run
hg debuginstall and several lines will be displayed,
the last one reading "no problems detected". Another quick and simple
test is just hg, which should output basic commands
that can be used with hg.