Backporting mercurial 0.9.5 to Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy”

by gldnspud on January 11, 2008

I've fallen in love with Mercurial. It's used by projects and people that I respect, and I'm using it more and more.

I wanted to make sure I was using the latest version, but I didn't want to uninstall gutsy's version 0.9.4 and install it from source, nor did I want to upgrade my entire system to hardy. I've played around with such bleeding-edge things in the past, and while I still like to bleed sometimes, the Linux desktop is not one of those areas in which I desire to. :)

So, what to do?

Fortunately, it's easy to backport it from hardy. Here's what I did:

  1. $ vim /etc/apt/sources.list

  2. Add this line to the end:

    deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ \
    hardy main restricted universe multiverse

  3. Save and exit.

  4. $ sudo apt-get update

  5. $ sudo apt-get build-dep mercurial

  6. $ fakeroot apt-get source -b mercurial

  7. $ sudo dpkg -i mercurial_0.9.5-2_i386.deb

Lather, rinse, then repeat steps 4 through 7 as necessary if you're anxious. Or, just wait three months for hardy. :)

Tagged as: gutsy, hardy, installing, mercurial, Python, ubuntu, upgrading

{ 6 comments }

Mike January 16, 2008 at 1:13 pm

Thanks for this tip. In trying it, I notice Step 5 needs to be “sudo apt-get build-dep mercurial”.

Jamie Whitehouse February 12, 2008 at 10:53 am

Any chance we could see this published in a Personal Package Archive (PPA) for those of use who don’t have the whole dev toolchain installed?

gldnspud February 13, 2008 at 11:18 am

@Mike: Thanks, I’ve corrected that mistake.

@Jamie: I just switched to Mac OS X again as my primary workstation, and 8.04 will hopefully be released on time, so I don’t think I will be the one to create a PPA. If someone else does though, I’ll gladly link to it at the top of this post. :)

David Van Couvering February 28, 2008 at 2:11 pm

Thanks, this was a life-saver! 0.9.4 is not supported in my group, and I really had no idea how to upgrade. I would *not* have been able to figure out these steps for the life of me – I actually still don’t know what I just did, but it worked! :)

gldnspud February 28, 2008 at 3:51 pm

@David: I’m glad it worked out well for you! It did take me a few years to remember all the pieces involved in doing something like that, and it’s still magical for me. I applaud Debian for building such a great set of tools.

What you just did was take a source package for something that’s in hardy but not gutsy, installed all of its build dependencies (which *are* in gutsy), built the source package into a .deb file, then installed the resulting .deb file. :)

Mekk March 4, 2008 at 7:55 am

Tiny (non-crucial) suggestion – it might be slightly more manageable to create the new file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hardysources.list (or so) and put the deb line there instead of editing main sources.list (which is better left for GUI tools). The rest works in the same way

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