Upgrading Mercurial
Published on January 24, 2011
The upgrade was required on the Mac and the latest package for Mac was downloaded from the Mercurial site. This give an installer package so installing is very easy.
Python was pre-installed on this system which gives half an excuse perhaps not to understand where Python puts third party modules but it does make my faith in package installers or the makefile rather blind. I avoid Fink and MacPorts through personal preference.
Previously I installed mercurial at version 1.6 so was able to make use of the package provided which has worked fine for six months. The problem is that the package doesn't provide an uninstaller nor instructions on how to get rid of it. Rather than install over the top which may very well have worked just fine, I wanted to clear out the the old installation of Mercurial. After checking on some threads the best advice I could find is here.
I had a look under /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages and found three folders that looked like the related to Mercurial
- hgext
- mercurial-1.6_20100701-py2.6.egg-info
- mercurial
These all got renamed which promptly broke hg with the following error:
abort: couldn't find mercurial libraries
The latest package was installed and prompted provided a cute message:
This package installs the hg executable in /usr/local/bin and the Mercurial files in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/mercurial.
The install was completed and three new folders - with the same names as those listed above - appeared under site-packages. I retried hg seems find and give a nice new shiny version number:
hg version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 1.7.3+20110102)