[Python-apps-team] Bug#729153: mercurial: fails to build from source on stable.

[Faheem Mitha]

On Sun, 17 Nov 2013, Javi Merino wrote:

> control: tags -1 + moreinfo
> control: severity -1 minor

> 2013/11/17 Javi Merino <vicho at debian.org>:

> I've just done this in a wheezy chroot:

> apt-get source -t sid mercurial
> cd mercurial-2.8/
> dch --bpo
> debuild -us -uc

> And it built "mercurial_2.8-2~bpo70+1_amd64.deb" and 
> "mercurial-common_2.8-2~bpo70+1_all.deb" that install and seem to work 
> fine in wheezy.  So I don't know what you're doing, all I can say is 
> that it works for me.

On looking at this more closely, I see the problem. As you can see from 
the error message, the errors occur at the lines

# Move templates and help installed by setup.py to their FHS-correct location

mv $(CURDIR)/debian/mercurial-common/usr/lib/python*/dist-packages/mercurial/templates $(CURDIR)/debian/mercurial-common/usr/lib/python*/dist-packages/mercurial/help $(CURDIR)/debian/mercurial-common/usr/share/mercurial

mv $(CURDIR)/debian/mercurial-common/usr/lib/python*/dist-packages/mercurial/locale $(CURDIR)/debian/mercurial-common/usr/share

On my system I have both python 2.6 and 2.7 installed. So I have two 
directories under debian/mercurial-common/usr/lib, namely 'python2.6' and 
'python2.7',

faheem at orwell:/usr/local/src/mercurial/mercurial-2.8/debian/mercurial-common/usr/lib$ ls
python2.6  python2.7

Ok, so given that this is the case, the problem is obvious. Because of the 
wild card, each of these commands runs twice, for each version of python, 
and presumably tries to copy the same files each time. So, it fails the 
second time because the files are already there.

I looked at the packaging for mercurial 2.7.2, and those lines were not 
there. So I guess they were added recently. It looks to me like they are 
buggy.

                                                          Regards, Faheem