IDisposable Thoughts

Days ago I just published a short blog post about using Mercurial as a SVN Client, I know, Subversion is the “now-legacy-vcs-system” and Git with Mercurial are the “cool kids” in the school, why not make them work together?

Well, in the same way we could make Subversion works with Hg (using extensions of course) we could make Git works with Mercurial. It requires a little more work in Windows but it stills easy to do. As usual we start with a TortoiseHg installation. I will try to show its installation in a short set of steps:

• We need to activate the Mercurial Bookmark and rebase extensions (these extensions are included with standard Mercurial installation). Edit your mercurial.ini file and add the following to the [extensions] section

[extensions]
rebase =
hgext.bookmarks = 

• HgGit needs a special python library to handle Git repositories, this library is named dulwich. You need to get it from its source repository, clone it in some directory
  
  hg clone http://bitbucket.org/abderrahim/dulwich
• Now we need to get the HgGit source code from its repository, let’s clone it from repository
  
  hg clone http://bitbucket.org/durin42/hg-git
• This is the hard part, we need to tell to HgGit the location where the dulwich library is installed. Remember, both HgGit and dalwich are Python libraries, so we’ll edit just a file to show where to get dalwich. Go to the place you cloned HgGit search and open the file __init__.py and add look for the following code and add the code highlighted

  import os
  
  # NOTE: Added for tortoisehg compatibility
  import sys
  sys.path.append('write here the directory where dulwich was cloned')
  
  from mercurial import commands, extensions, hg, util as hgutil
  from mercurial.i18n import _

• Now let’s activate the extension, open again your mercurial.ini file and add the following line to your [extensions] section

  hggit = directory where hggit where cloned\hggit

And that is all, just test your extension installation with hg help extensions And look for hggit

Now you can clone, rebase, push, pull and do whatever you do with mercurial but using remote git repositories, for example, now you can do something like

hg clone http://github.com/castleproject/Castle.Core.git castle

I hope this guide could help you to get more fun from Mercurial, see you later!