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:
$ vim /etc/apt/sources.list
Add this line to the end:
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ \ hardy main restricted universe multiverseSave and exit.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get build-dep mercurial
$ fakeroot apt-get source -b mercurial
$ 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. :)
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this tip. In trying it, I notice Step 5 needs to be “sudo apt-get build-dep mercurial”.
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?
@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. :)
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! :)
@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. :)
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