Mercurial Under Wine

How to use Wine for developing and testing Mercurial's Windows support under Linux and elsewhere.

1. Introduction

It's possible to get Mercurial working under Wine with no Windows components. This is useful for cross-platform testing if you don't want use Windows.

You'll need the following packages:

• Wine (obviously)

• Python for Windows

• MinGW (for compiling extensions)

Wine is a sufficiently good emulation of Windows to exercise at least the following:

• most Mercurial functionality, including networking support
• case sensitivity issues and other path naming issues
• console and GUI charset and encoding behavior
• 32-bit memory fragmentation and restrictions
• subprocess and pipe oddities
• EOL behavior

2. Getting a Wine command prompt

Once you have Wine installed, something like this should get you a command prompt:

wineconsole cmd

You'll probably want to start with 'cd c:\' to get to Wine's fake Windows install, where you can install new packages safely. From here, you should be able to run the installers for Python, etc. This is stored in $HOME/.wine/drive_c if you want to get at these files from the Linux side.

You'll also want to setup your PATH variable. Run 'start regedit' and edit the key under HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/SessionManager/Environment/Path.

3. Building Mercurial Extensions

Once you've got Python and MinGW installed and a Mercurial tree unpacked in an appropriate place, you can build Mercurial's extensions with something like the following:

python setup.py build_ext -i -f -c mingw32

4. Tips

Create a 'win' (or 'lose' if you prefer) script in your host environment like the following to make starting Wine in console mode more convenient:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c
wineconsole cmd > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Create an 'hg.bat' script in 'c:\windows' to make running hg easier:

@c:\python25\python c:\hg\hg %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

5. Py2Exe and InnoSetup

These programs install just fine but won't yet work correctly in Wine (as of Wine 0.9.25) due to emulation of BeginUpdateResource() being incomplete (see http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3897).

CategoryDevelopers CategoryWindows CategoryTesting CategoryHowTo