Hackable Mercurial for Windows

An approach to easily hack on the Mercurial source on Windows.

1. What is the Hackable package?

Compiling Mercurial is a significant barrier to testing and developing Mercurial on Windows. This package attempts to minimize that barrier by including:

2. Downloading and using

The package can be found here. Simply download, unzip, and run the included hg.exe. This package will not interfere with your existing Mercurial or Python installation.

<!> There is usually no need to download new copies between releases, simply pull and update.

/!\ This package includes no global configuration, so if you're not already using Mercurial, you will need to configure your username and merge tools.

3. How it's built and how to build your own from scratch

Needed components:

Steps:

4. Running the test suite under MSYS

Most of the test suite can now be run on windows too. Writing tests and debugging failures might however require both knowledge of the traditional unix environment and of the windows environment.

The tests that can’t be run on windows will automatically be skipped, so no test failures should be seen. The tests are run automatically by the hg buildbot.

Creating a hg-winhack package and running the test suite requires almost the same environment. The following instructions will thus contain a lot of duplication of the instructions given above, and the instructions could perhaps be merged. (The “hackable” mentioned above might not work in development branches.)

4.1. Install MinGW/MSYS environment

4.2. Build hg-winhack

# create build directory
hg clone http://selenic.com/hg hg-winhack   # bootstrap Mercurial somehow
cd hg-winhack
# install python
wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/python-2.7.3.msi
msiexec //i python-2.7.3.msi //qb   # avoid MSYS magic mangling of '/i'
cp -ar c:/Python27 hg-python     # python can and should now be uninstalled again
sed -i 's,-mno-cygwin, ,g' hg-python/Lib/distutils/cygwinccompiler.py
# build Mercurial extensions
hg-python/python setup.py build_ext -i --compiler=mingw32 build_mo
# create hg.exe launcher
sed 's,^#!/usr/bin/env python,#!hg-python/python27.dll,g' hg > hg.py
wget http://effbot.org/media/downloads/exemaker-1.2-20041012.zip -O exemaker.zip
unzip -j exemaker.zip '*/exemaker.exe'
rm exemaker.zip
mv exemaker.exe hg.exe
# prepare localizations - this will fail after it has done what we need
make local
# zip it and ship it ... or continue running the test suite
cd ..
zip -r hg-winhack-x.x.zip hg-winhack/

Note that this will leave you with both a hg.exe which can be used from windows and a hg.py which might be picked up if you have python with a .py installed.

/!\ This version of exemaker will interpret the relative python path as relative to the current working directory. A new version from timeless should fix that.

4.3. Run the test suite

cd hg-winhack/tests
export TMPDIR=c:/tmp   # to avoid path that contains ~ which in general would require escaping
PATH="`pwd`/../hg-python:/mingw/bin:/bin" ./run-tests.py --local

PATH can be extended so other non-msys tools (such as git/svn/p4?) can be found.

4.4. Alternative: Building the C extensions with Microsoft compiler

Get and install the gratis "Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1" from microsoft.com. It contains both the x86 and x64 Microsoft C/C++ compiler.

To build Mercurial in a MSYS shell simply do:

make local

This then allows to run the testsuite with:

cd tests
python run-tests.py --local

4.5. Run tests involving Git

If you have Git installed on your Windows box, hg-winhack will incorrectly detect that git command is available, and will try to run Git-related tests. It will fail to do so, because it cannot run "git.cmd" from shell.

#!/bin/sh
"$COMSPEC" //C git.cmd "$@"

5. See also


CategoryDeveloper