Thought I would jot down my experiences installing Mercurial on a Mac running Tiger. Mac’s are great for some things, but they can be a bit of a pain when it comes to installing unix open source software.
The first thing I tried was installing the latest binary package from the Mercurial site. It is dependent on python, so first I installed MacPython 2.5 by following the link on the Mercurial Page. Then I tried installing the Mercurial binary package, but it complained because it couldn’t find Apple Python. Tried rebooting, didn’t work, go figure.
The second thing I tried was building from source. This is my preferred way of installing this kind of software, because you can explicitly manage the versions yourself. However the build failed because I didn’t have the documentation tools installed (these can be installed via MacPorts). Also, I didn’t seem to have my python path set up properly, because the built hg executable barfed with an error.
The third way I tried was installing via MacPorts. This worked very easily, once MacPorts was installed. The current version of MacPorts required a newer version of Xcode tools than what was already installed. So it was off to the apple developer site (I already had a login) to download the latest version, which is about 1GB.
IMHO, to have to sign up to an Apple site to get the current C compiler so you can build open source software is really poor form from Apple.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Installing Mercurial on Tiger
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I got up and running with MacPorts straight away (I didn't try any of the other methods).
It's interesting to note that you needed a newer version of Xcode. I would have assumed we had the same version (since you were the one who installed it on my machine last October) and I didn't run into any problems installing (a recent version of) MacPorts. For what it's worth, my environment is:
OS/X 10.4 (Tiger)
Xcode 2.4.1
MacPorts 1.600
Mecurial 0.9.5
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