TortoiseSVN + TortoiseHg Problem

I use Subversion (SVN) for cSuneido (for historical reasons) and Mercurial (Hg) for jSuneido, both on SourceForge (again for historical reasons).

On Windows I use TortoiseSVN (1.8.5) and TortoiseHg (2.11.2) with Pageant (part of PuTTY, but supplied with TortoiseHg) so I don't have to type a password all the time. This combination has worked well for a long time.

I came into work this morning and TortoiseSVN kept popping up a Plink dialog asking for my password. That's what Pageant is supposed to avoid, especially since SourceForge needs an SSH key, not a password.

TortoiseHg was working fine, which meant Pageant was ok.

I used TortoiseSVN a few days ago. As far as I can recall I didn't change anything since then. But possibly I updated it. There are so many updates going by these days that it's hard to remember.

I searched the web but didn't find anything that seemed to be related.

I tried rebooting. I tried changing my path to put TortoiseHg and TortoiseSVN in the opposite order. Didn't help.

After some digging I found TortoiseHg was using older versions of TortoisePlink and pageant (both from 2012) whereas TortoiseSVN had a new TortoisePlink (from 2014). I wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I tried replacing the new TortoisePlink with the old one, thinking that maybe it needed to match the version of pageant.

That worked! Or at least appears to work. (I even rebooted to make sure the problem wouldn't come back.) It's probably going to break next time I update TortoiseSVN, and I'll probably forget the fix, but at least I'll have this blog post to jog my memory :-) And hopefully in the long run this will get sorted out. I can't be the only person running both. I'm not sure why TortoiseHg has such old versions. There seem to have been similar version issues a few years ago.

Eclipse + MercurialEclipse Problem

Since I updated to Eclipse Juno 4.2 I've had problems a few times where Eclipse won't start - you just get a pop up saying an error has occurred and to look in the log. Often this seems to follow killing (Force Quit on Mac OS X) Eclipse after it freezes (locks up).

You can see from the log that the problem seems to be related to the MercurialEclipse plugin. I'm not sure if the original freezing is also caused by MercurialEclipse, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Side note: Mac OS X doesn't make it easy to access files starting with a dot, in a directory whose name starts with a dot. You can't really do it with the Finder (AFAIK). You can't even do it with an editor since the standard open file dialog also hides them. I usually just open a terminal window and cat /Users/andrew/workspace/.metadata/.log (On the positive side, you can copy the path from the error pop up and paste it into the terminal window.)

The solution I've come up with is:

• go into your Eclipse/plugins directory
• rename com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse_<version>.jar to ...jarX (i.e. add X on the end)
• start Eclipse (it should work now, but you won't have Mercurial)
• quit from Eclipse
• rename the file back (remove the X from the end)

For me, this seems to solve the problem. I'm guessing that what is really required is to "reset" MercurialEclipse and I've just found a roundabout way to do that.

Upgrading to Lion

As much as I know better than to rush to new technology, I couldn't resist upgrading to Lion right away.

I wasn't really paying attention, but it took about an hour to download the 4gb update from the App Store.

I knew I had four machines to update (my iMac and MacBook, and Shelley's iMac and MacBook) so I looked up online how to update multiple machines from a single download.

The trick is that there is a disk image inside the download that you can use to make a bootable DVD or USB drive. But you need to do that after you download, but before you install. One of the better explanations was HOW TO: Do a Clean Install of OS X Lion

Without thinking, I started burning a DVD, only to realize that the MacBook Air's don't have DVD drives. So I grabbed the thumb drive I had handy and tried to use it. But it was only 4gb and the image didn't fit. I thought I'd have to get a bigger thumb drive but then I remembered I had a small USB hard disk that I use for backing up photos when travelling. It was more than big enough.

The install went smoothly. Again, I didn't time it, but it was something like half an hour.

The next morning, when I tried to start Eclipse to do some programming, I got "no JRE installed" and it asked if I wanted to install one. I said yes and after quite a long pause (30 seconds?) it installed one and Eclipse started. Not bad!

I needed to reselect the JRE in Eclipse. Then a test failed because I'd forgotten to enable asserts on that JRE. But after that, all the tests passed. So far so good.

Then I found Mercurial was broken. A quick internet search found Mercurial SCM (hg) fix for OS X 10.7 Lion. Even better, I read to the bottom before I tried the fix and found there was an updated installer for Mercurial on Lion. I downloaded and installed it and Mercurial was back in business.

It did take quite a while to re-index for Spotlight searching but that happened in the background.

iTunes gave me a rather frightening message about not being able to save my music library, but it seems to be working fine.

Those are really the only problems I've had so far. Not too bad, considering.

I updated my MacBook using the USB hard disk. It went smoothly also.

One change that is going to take some getting used to is the reversing of the scroll direction. Admittedly, the old way does seem backwards - pulling your finger down to scroll up. Now it's the same as the iPhone or iPad, with a metaphor of dragging the page around. But old habits are hard to break and I keep trying to scroll the wrong direction. And I still use Windows at work which will be the opposite way, although with a mouse wheel rather than swiping on a Magic Mouse.

I can't imagine Microsoft having the guts to make this kind of change. Nor can I imagine Microsoft users standing for it - they would just flip the setting to "Classic" mode. (The same way most of my staff immediately switched new versions of Windows to the old Classic appearance, despite my protests.) It would be interesting to know how many Mac users switch it back to the old way.

There will probably be other issues I haven't run into yet, but so far it's been a pretty smooth update.

Eclipse += Mercurial

It wasn't quite as easy as I would have liked to get the MercurialEclipse plugin working, but it certainly could have been worse.

It was easy to install the Eclipse plugin using the update site: http://cbes.javaforge.com/update

But when I tried to import my project from Mercurial I got a bunch of errors about passwords.

I found a post from someone with the same problem, with a pointer to instructions on how to solve it.

I guess the simple username + password doesn't work with MercurialEclipse, at least on OS X. Sigh.

The answer is to use an SSH key, which I'd avoided till now, but it turned out to be straightforward with the help of the SourceForge instructions. It sounds like it might be a bit trickier on my Windows box - I haven't tried that yet.

I tweaked a few things for the new setup, committed those changes, and pushed the changes to the SourceForge repository. Seems like I'm good to go :-)