LinLog

Disclaimer: This is yet another "note to self" post.  If you're not me, feel free to ignore it.

After God alone knows how many years (at least six, since I have posts related to it from 2010), it's finally time up upgrade the version of Mercurial that I have installed on my shared web hosting account.  This is a shared hosting account with no shell access - nothing but web-based tools and FTP.  I also don't know what OS it's running - just that it's some form of Linux.  So I've been putting this off for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately for me, the defaults for repository creation in Mercurial 3.7 turn on general delta support by default.  That isn't supported by the old version I was running (1.7), so my choices are to either use the now non-standard, older, and less efficient format my repositories, or just bite the bullet and upgrade.  So I did the latter, since the version I had was pretty ancient and I was going to have to do it eventually anyway.

Fortunately, my hosting provider supports Python 2.7, which gets you most of Mercurial.  However, there are some C-based components to Mercurial.  Since I have no shell access to the hosting server, and there are probably no development tools installed even if I did, I had to try compiling on a VM.  I was able to do that by spinning up a Fedora 24 VM (on the assumption that they're running RHEL, or something close enough to it), and doing a local build.  The only caveat was that apparently my provider is running a 32-bit OS, because building on a 64-bit VM resulted in errors about the ELF format being incorrect.

Once the Fedora VM was up and running, I was able to do a build by running the following:
sudo dnf install python-devel
sudo dnf install redhat-rpm-config
cd /path/to/mercurial-3.8.x
make local

That's about it.  After I had a working build I was able to copy the Mercurial 3.8 folder to the server, right over top of the old version, and it just worked.  Upgrade accomplished!

Note: This post is mostly a note to myself. I don't do this often and I always forget a step when I need to do it again.

I have Mercurial set up on my hosting provider. I'm using hgweb.cgi and it works well enough. However, Mercurial does not seem to support pushing new repositories remotely when using this configuration. That is, you can't just run an hg push on the client or anything like that - you need to do some manual setup.

The steps to do this are as follows:

1) On the client, do you hg init to create a new repository.
2) Copy this directory to your server in the appropriate location.
3) On the server, edit your new_repo_dir/.hg/hgrc to something like this (if you have one that you copied form step 1, just nuke it):

[web]
allow_push = youruser
description = Some description
name = your_repo_dir

4) Add a line like this to your hgweb.config:
your_repo_dir = /path/to/repo/your_repo_dir

Assuming that the rest of the server is already set up, that should do it. I always keep forgetting one of the last two steps, for some reason (probably because I only do this once in a while).

OK, that was a little confusing.

So after my initial attempt at a Mercurial hook to connect my public repository to my Mantis instance, I decided to rearrange things a little. Initially, I was using a "commit" hook on my local machine. However, for the public bug tracker with the public repository, it made more sense to put the hook on the server. So I switched it to an "incoming" hook in my hgweb.config.

Actually converting the script to work with my Linux based web host was pretty easy. Just one command, really:

#!/bin/bash

basedir='/path/to/base/hg/install/dir'
mantis='/path/to/mantis/wwwroot/scripts/checkin.php'
hg="$basedir/hg"

$hg log -vr $HG_NODE --style $basedir/mercurial/templates/multiline | php $mantis

Nice and simple, right?

The hard/annoying part was in the style template file. Seem I wanted my commit message to have multiple lines and indent the file list, like this:

Changeset 85:5f7504e02f1c by Peter Geer, Mon Jan 17 23:12:46 2011 -0500
Updated plugin for PHP5 and fixed blog root when taken from defined constant (fix bug 0000021).
lib/blog.php
plugins/menubar_breadcrumbs.php

Problem was, it just didn't work. I was using exactly the same template text as in the old hook script, but I was getting everything on the same line. By switching from "\n" to "\r\n" as my newline escape code, I was able to get newlines to work, but the indentation still didn't.

Guess what fixed it - switching from double to single quotes.

changeset = 'Changeset {branches}{rev}:{node|short} by {author|person}, {date|date}\n{desc}\n{files} '
file = ' {file}\n'

Seriously. That's it. No mention of that in the manual - they're supposed to be the same. In fact, the example of this in the manual uses double-quotes.

Oddly enough, using double-quotes worked just fine on the command line. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact that I'm using hgweb or something. Either way, that really sucked.

Note to self: just because Powershell defines aliases that mimic many of the standard UNIX commands does not mean they function the same way.

Last night, I was trying to migrate my company's Subversion repository to Mercurial - not for production use (yet), just as an experiment. After eventually getting the latest Mercurial installed on the Ubuntu 8.04 VM that hosts our Subversion repository, I tried running hg convert -s svn /path/to/svn/repo /path/to/hg/repo. As expected, the conversion process took some time, but chugged along nicely...for a while. Eventually, it hit an error and came back with:
svn: In file '/build/buildd/subversion-1.6.9dfsg/subversion/libsvn_ra/ra_loader.c' line 595: assertion failed (*path != '/')

I Googled around a bit, but still have no idea what that error message means or how to fix it. My best guess is that something is borked in our repo - not broken enough to break SVN, but maybeSo I tried a different tack - take the repository dump I had, import it into a fresh repository, and try again. That didn't go so well....

Since the SVN VM has a very small drive, I decided to load the dumpfile on my local Windows box. As you may know, svnadmin load reads streams, so you have to either pipe the dump file in or redirect standard input. Well, my first instinct was to do something like this:
svnadmin load newrepos < dumpfile.repo
One problem with that: the "<" character that you normally use for redirecting STDIN is reserved in Powershell. Drat! So I figured I'd just use a pipe instead:
cat dumpfile.repo | svnadmin load newrepos
So I ran that and waited. And shortly after I started waiting, I noticed my system slowing down. And then things started grinding to a halt - it was just barely responding. When I finally managed to get resmon up, I noticed that Powershell was eating nearly all of my system's RAM! And the command still hadn't produced a single line of output!

I'm not sure exactly what Powershell was doing, but it must have something to do with the Get-Content commandlet (for which "cat" is an alias) not liking the 1.4 GB dump file. Why it would use up more than twice the size of the file in memory, I'm not sure.

Anyway, I just switched to cmd.exe and did the input redirection method, which didn't eat huge amounts of memory. However, it didn't work either. The import died shortly after starting with an error about a bad transaction. Looks like the gods of revision control are not smiling on me today.

Last time I mentioned that I'd set up Mantis with a Subversion hook. Well, I've been rethinking the Subversion part.

I was listened to a back episode of Hanselminutes last week in which Scott was interviewing SourceGear's interviewing Eric Sink about DVCS and it was a very interesting conversation. Source control is one of those things you don't usually think about as a developer. You learn how to use a source control system that's "good enough", and after that, just sort of take it for granted. You certainly don't spend a lot of time jumping back and forth between systems and trying out the possibilities.

I really liked the way Eric explained distributed version control. As he pointed out, most of the arguments for DVCS that you hear seem pretty pointless, such as "There's no central server," or "You can commit on an airplane." Well...so what? Why wouldn't I want a central server - how else do you determine the authoritative repository? And honestly, who does important work on an airplane?

Instead, Eric framed the discussion in terms of flexibility. The flip-side of the above stupid arguments is actually pretty compelling. With DVCS, there's no central server, but that just means that your central server is determined by convention, not by the software, and it's much easier to set up "slave" repositories for remote sites. Likewise, while being able to commit on a plane is pointless, there's definite value in not needing to have a connection to the server to do core version control operations. Or, to put it another way, I may not code on a plane, but I do often code in coffee shops with slow WiFi connections.

So, in light of that, I decided to give Mercurial a try. According to Eric, it's fairly user-friendly, especially for Subversion users, and it's fairly Windows-friendly (it even has a TortoiseHg client, for whatever that's worth). So, since I was thinking of resurrecting LnBlog, I decided to use that as my test-case.

That leads me back into the Subversion hooks tie-in. Since I went to all the trouble of setting up an issue tracker and hooking it to SVN, I figured I'd do the same with Mercurial. Fortunately, it wasn't too bad once I figured out what I needed to do. I was able to fairly easily adapt the Powershell script I wrote for Subversion to work with Mercurial. In fact, the Mercurial version was actually shorter.

Actually adding a commit hook in Mercurial is pretty simple. You just add a line to your .hgrc file:
[hooks]
commit = powershell \path\to\hg-commit-hook.ps1
It seems that Mercurial preserves the environment for hooks, so you don't seem to have to worry about absolute paths and such like you do in Subversion.

The changes to the script itself were fairly small. This wiki page had a few good examples that got me started. The two big things were the passing of data and generating the message to pass to Mantis. Mercurial actually passes data into hook scripts through environment variables rather than command-line parameters, which is nice in that you actually get meaningful variable names coming in. As for the message generation, Mercurial's log command allows you to specify a template for its output, including substitution variables and some simple formatting functions. The result is a nice, short script with only a couple of calls to hg:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Web") | Out-Null

$issue = hg log -vr $env:HG_NODE

# If we don't have an issue number, just exit.
if ($issue -match "\b(?:bug|issue)\s*[#]{0,1}(\d+)\b") {
   
   $style_file = @'
changeset = "Changeset {branches}{rev}:{node|short} by {author|person}, {date|date}\n{desc}\n{files}"
file = " {file}\n"
'@
   Write-Output $style_file | Out-File -Encoding ASCII -Width 1000 hgstyle

   $data = hg log -vr $env:HG_NODE --style hgstyle
   rm hgstyle

   # Keep the cast to string from clobbering line breaks.
   $data = [String]::Join("`n", $data)
   $postData = "secret=somePassword&message="
   $postData += [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($data)

   C:\Cygwin\bin\wget.exe -O req.out --post-data=$postData http://yourhost.com/path/to/mantis/scripts/do_checkin.php
   rm req.out
}

That's it - a measly two calls to Mercurial, including one to see if we even need to run the hook. By specifying the right template, we can get the entire message in one command. That template gives me something like this:
Changeset 70:cbdb625298ca by Peter Geer, Mon Dec 13 16:45:53 2010 -0500
Got rid of unneeded requires now that we have an autoloader (issue #0000005).
   lib/article.php
   lib/creators.php
Perhaps not quite as pretty as the Subversion version, but close enough for now. Perhaps if I feel like getting really fancy, I'll look at the Python API for Mercurial and try my hand at writing some in-process hook code.

Edit: Updated the script to put each of the listed file on a new, indented line.