Using Mercurial and SVN 19 August 2010
At Sony we’re looking for a distributed version control system to replace Subversion—primarily Git and Mercurial. I’m very familiar with Git but hadn’t done much with Mercurial so it seemed like a good idea to use it for a couple of weeks and learn the quirks. Since I’m stuck using Subversion I decided to see if it would be feasible to use Mercurial as a “super client” working locally then pushing changes back to svn. A little Googling turned up two candidates hgsvn and hgsubversion. hgsubversion extends the commands pushing and pulling changes, giving a more native experience, so it seemed like the best choice for learning the system.
The setup is actually pretty simple but I’m documenting it for my own future reference.
Use MacPorts to Install hgsubversion:
sudo port install py26-hgsubversion
Enable the rebase and hgsubversion extensions:
printf "[extensions]\nrebase=\nhgsubversion =\n" >> ~/.hgrc
Check that the extension was enabled:
hg help extensions
It should list something like:
enabled extensions:
hgsubversion
integration with Subversion repositories
Now you’re good to checkout from SVN (note: using the svn+ prefix in the URL
lets you use passwords stored in your keychain):
hg clone svn+http://example.com/svn/repo/trunk
I actually ran into an issue where the clone was exploding with a stack trace. The bug had been fixed in 1.1.2 but MacPorts hadn’t yet been updated so I rolled a patch to update it.