mercurial 0.7 doesn't work with python 2.4

[Henning Sprang]

Mercurial 0.7 on Ubuntu Dapper with python 2.4 gives a long traceback message when trying to do any real work. When just typing "hg" it prints the help message with no error, but any real command (e.g. hg update, hg revert, ...) gives just a long, meaningless traceback message.

I contacted the mercurial developers and where told that I should use the newest versio 0.9 - they are not surprised that mercurial 0.7 doesn't work at all with python 2.4.
(I'll forward these mails containing that conversation here later).

as the mercurial hg script starts with
#!/usr/bin/env python

A workaround would be to change this line to use python2.3 and install this package accordingly.

It would be better, though, if Ubuntu wouldn't package spoftware that is totally unable to run in such a default configuration in the very first place, that doesn't look exactly well maintained....

Please update the mercurial package for dapper to 0.9 with the next maintenance release...

Henning

[Henning Sprang (henning)]

Before I had this error with Ubuntu, I had the same error with SuSE,
too, where the default python version is also 2.4.

Here's the response I got from the mercurial developers:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: mercurial giving meaningless error messages / imppossible
to run simple commands
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:11:00 -0700
From: Bryan O'Sullivan <email address hidden>
To: Henning Sprang <email address hidden>
CC: <email address hidden>
References: <email address hidden>

On Sun, 2006-07-09 at 17:14 +0200, Henning Sprang wrote:

> When trying to use mercurial 0.7 on SuSE Linux 10.1, for example with
> the command
> "hg revert /PATH/TO/FILE" to revert a locally chnaged file, I get the
> absolutely unhelpful message shown at the end of this mail.

Mercurial 0.7 is very old. If you could retry with a newer version,
such as 0.9, that would be a big help.

> I cant tell if the fault is probably on me because I do something
> wrong, because from this message I cant identify anything i could do
> different than I do.

When Mercurial prints a big traceback-style error message like that,
it's a sign that something very unexpected happened. So reporting the
error to the list is quite appropriate.

Thanks,

 <b

[Henning Sprang (henning)]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: mercurial giving meaningless error messages / imppossible
to run simple commands
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:21:54 -0700
From: Bryan O'Sullivan <email address hidden>
To: Henning Sprang <email address hidden>
CC: <email address hidden>
References:
<email address hidden>
<email address hidden>
<email address hidden>

On Sat, 2006-07-15 at 17:11 +0200, Henning Sprang wrote:

> In addition, as I am testing some things with different Linux
> dustributions, I realized that on Ubuntu Dapper, the included mercurial
> 0.7x packae shows the same error as mercurial 0.7 on suse 10.1.

I'm not surprised. I'm glad that using 0.9 seems to fix the issue.

 <b

[Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz)]

Mercurial 0.9 is present in Edgy.
If you need such package for Dapper, you may consider to file a backport request.
Thank you.

[^rooker (rooker)]

The backport to Dapper was declined and the request marked as "Invalid":
https://bugs.launchpad.net/dapper-backports/+bug/52529

Any inofficial solution/suggestion from anyone so far?

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

Backports are not for providing fixes to significant bugs. They should be fixed via stable release update. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates for the process. Backports are not enabled by default and serious bugs should be fixed for all users.