Category: mercurial

Installing latest mercurial when Ubuntu or Linux Mint repos don’t have it

Ah I just hit an interesting problem with Mercurial. I had a repository which had been created with a recent version however I had to restore it from a backup onto another machine however I couldn’t commit to it as it’s format wasn’t supported:

$ hg st
abort: requirement ‘dotencode’ not supported!

The reason is that the dotencode format was only introduced into mercurial in version 1.7 so if you’re running an earlier version then you’ll get this error. Ok so upgrade – problem is that according to apt I had the latest version – 1.6.3 – erm nope thats not the latest.

Thankfully the fix is simple, all you need is to ass the correct repository first before installing the latest version

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mercurial-ppa/releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mercurial

Once you’ve done that then you’ll find mercurial will work again as expected.

ssh-askpass on OSX 10.5

I’ve been playing with NetBeans 6.7M3 and the latest Mercurial plugin and found that I couldn’t push to a remote repository via ssh. All netbeans would return was:

Mercurial Push
--------------
INFO Pushing To: ssh://pmount@lego.office.gameaccount.com/hg/ga4Partner ...
ERROR Command failed:
Command: [/usr/local/bin/hg, outgoing, -v, --template=rev:{rev}\nauth:{author}\ndesc:{desc}\ndate:{date|hgdate}\nid:{node|short}\n\nendCS:\n, --repository, /Users/peter/dev/gameaccount/maven/ga4Partner, ssh://pmount@lego.office.gameaccount.com/hg/ga4Partner]
Output: [running ssh pmount@lego.office.gameaccount.com “hg -R hg/ga4Partner serve --stdio”, remote: ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory, remote: Host key verification failed., abort: no suitable response from remote hg!]
INFO: End of Mercurial Push

Here the remote server is trying to prompt for the login password but fails because OSX 10.5 does not have the ssk-askpass command.

After some searching on the net (ok Google who else) I found Mercurial Push from IntelliJ where someone had a similar position with IntelliJ. By creating the following script mercurial in NB6.7M3 works flawlessly:

sabrina:~ peter$ sudo vi /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass
#! /bin/sh  
  
#  
# An SSH_ASKPASS command for MacOS X  
#  
# Author: Joseph Mocker, Sun Microsystems  
  
#  
# To use this script:  
#     setenv SSH_ASKPASS "macos-askpass"  
#     setenv DISPLAY ":0"  
#  
  
TITLE=${MACOS_ASKPASS_TITLE:-"SSH"}  
  
DIALOG="display dialog \"$@\" default answer \"\" with title \"$TITLE\""  
DIALOG="$DIALOG with icon caution with hidden answer"  
  
result=`osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"' -e "activate"  -e "$DIALOG" -e 'end tell'`  
  
if [ "$result" = "" ]; then  
    exit 1  
else  
    echo "$result" | sed -e 's/^text returned://' -e 's/, button returned:.*$//'  
    exit 0  
fi  

sabrina:~ peter$ sudo chmod +x /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass
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