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
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Download (HTTP): https://www.mercurial-scm.org/release/mercurial-6.6.2.tar.gz
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Download MD5 sum: f79602d5bc2d3c4db6fda4738d4d6a25
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Download size: 7.9 MB
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Estimated disk space required: 115 MB (with docs, add 1.5 GB for tests)
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Estimated build time: 0.3 SBU (with docs; add 14 SBU for tests; both using parallelism=8)
Mercurial Dependencies
Optional
docutils-0.20.1 (required to build the documentation), git-2.43.0, GPGME-1.23.2 (with Python bindings), OpenSSH-9.6p1 (runtime, to access ssh://... repositories), Pygments-2.17.2, rustc-1.75.0 (see rust/README.rst and rust/rhg/README.md), Subversion-1.14.3 (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.