C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:52:48 -0400 (CLT)

Two separate pieces of information here - how to use Mercurial in a
"centralised" way, and how to get things working nicely in OpenSuse.

First, the "centralised" part.  It wasn't clear to me at first how I would
actually use Hg.  I am used to having a central svn repo that is backed
up, and that I use as a reference from various computers.  I still wanted
that with Hg, but it wasn't clear how to arrange things.

What I ended up doing (and I am still not sure this is correct, although
it seems OK) is the following:

 - create a system group "hg"
 - create a system user "hg" whose empty home directory is /srv/hg
   and whose default group is "hg"
 - create a directory under /srv/hg called repos
 - in that directory, as the hg user, import code from svn
   (I had everything in a single svn repo but am separating things
   out with hg, so there's a single repo for lepl at the moment).
   (this uses "hg convert" - the command I ran was
   hg convert svn://10.2.0.1/default/src/python \
     --config convert.svn.trunk=lepl/trunk \
     --config convert.svn.branches=lepl
   which let me import versions at the same level as trunk)

That places a lepl repo (I had to rename it from whatever it was called by
default) in /srv/hg/repos

Next I wanted to be able to look at it via the web.  There's a fairly
detailed explanation at
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/HgWebDirStepByStep but it
places the repo in srv/www for some reason.  That's not necessary (as far
as I can tell so far - I'll post again to this thread if I find out
otherwise).

So I adapted the instructions at that link and did the following:

 - downloaded the entire hg codebase (I think) into a temp directory
   using the command
   hg clone http://www.selenic.com/repo/hg-stable
 - that was the only way I could get hold of hgwebdir.cgi (is it
   just me or do the links in the instructions not work for everyone?)
 - create the directory /srv/www/htdocs/hg
 - put the hgwebdir.cgi in that directory
 - add hgweb.config with contents:

[collections]
/srv/hg/repos = /srv/hg/repos

[web]
style = gitweb

 - make sure permissions, ownership etc were OK (ie same as other
   projects in /srv/www - use wwwrun/www)
 - create the file hg.conf in /etc/apache2/conf.d as in the
   instructions above
 - restart apache

That gave me a very ugly site at http://localhost/hg

I should also have mentioned that I installed mercurial from Yast before
all this.

I spent some time trying to fathom why my site was so much uglier than
others on the web before realising that opensuse's defauly mercurial
install is rather old (1.0.2).  You can install a much more recent version
from the build service at http://software.opensuse.org/search - just type
"mercurial" in the box and click away.

Once that was done, I got the nice web site with trainline graphs that
showed the different release versions.  Nice :o)

Andrew