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Install Mercurial 1.9, Dulwich, and Hg-Git on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Thu, 2011-09-22 22:36 — Jaharmi

Here is my current installation method for Mercurial 1.9 and Hg-Git on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I use Hg-Git on a sporadic basis to work with projects on Github. That activity is frequent enough that it’s really helpful to be able to get Hg-Git set up and working quickly.

I had a rough time with Hg-Git after I upgraded to Mercurial 1.9 a few weeks ago. It was notable because that was the first time I can remember having incompatibilities between this stack of software. Since then, Hg-Git has changes available that allow it to install and work with newer versions of Mercurial, including version 1.9, and the most recent Dulwich release. These changes weren’t as readily available at the time I upgraded, so I thought it was worth writing this to remind me how to put the right pieces together.

  1. Install Mercurial 1.9.2. The installers for Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion are available from the main Mercurial site.
  2. Install Dulwich 0.8.0 using easy_install. Here is where I learned you could specify a minimum version or a specific version with easy_install. While doing so is not strictly necessary in this case, I am writing it down to remember the next time I need it.
    sudo easy_install ‘dulwich>=0.8’
  3. Obtain hg-git 0.3.1 using Augie Fackler’s repository on Bitbucket.org. We will clone it into /tmp, so that it will exist there only until reboot. It’ll get cleaned up and removed, which is fine, because I typically don’t need this repository stored on my drive.
    cd /tmp
    hg clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/durin42/hg-git hg-git-work
  4. Run the setup process for hg-git from your local clone.
    cd /tmp/hg-git-work
    sudo python setup.py install
  5. Add hg-git to the “[extensions]” section of your ~/.hgrc file, creating the ~/.hgrc file if needed, as documented for Hg-Git.

I don’t yet have a working installation method for all of this software on Mac OS X Lion. I ran into a stumbling block getting Dulwich installed there, and Dulwich is a necessity for Hg-Git. Update: The situation changed a few days later, and I have instructions for Mac OS X Lion available now.

This may have been a problem isolated to the particular Lion system I was using. I haven’t had the chance to duplicate it elsewhere or troubleshoot the problem on the system where I encountered it.

Update: Since I wrote this, Hg-Git 0.3.1 became available through PyPI, which means you can install it via easy_install. You no longer need to clone the Hg-Git repository and run the setup process manually. Instead, you can run the following single command to get Hg-Git 0.3.1 and its dependencies (Dulwich 0.8.0 or later):

$ sudo easy_install ‘hg-git>=0.3.1’

This simplifies the instructions quite a bit, but I leave the original steps above for reference.