Confusing Error Message if Installing without Mercurial
Created originally on Bitbucket by wjherrmann (Will Herrmann)
I recently installed MercurialEclipse without having Mercurial on my machine (I had assumed that it would be installed with the plugin). Unfortunately after it was installed and I restarted Eclipse, the MercurialEclipse preferences opened and I got the following error message:
. Command line: hg -y debuginstall
See 'Details' for more information
Clicking details just repeats ". Command line: hg -y debuginstall" (also note that there is a period just floating at the beginning of the message)
I had no idea what this meant. I assumed that it tried to run the command to install (like I said, I thought it would install it for me) and received an error, but it wasn't telling me what it was. After about ten minutes of poking around, I figured out that the problem was that I had to install Mercurial myself and that it was trying to tell me that it assumed I had an improper installation, thus hg -y debuginstall would display any errors.
I'd like to suggest that the error message be changed to something like the following:
MercurialEclipse could not find an installation of Mercurial on your computer. If you believe that it is installed, try running the following in the command line: hg -y debuginstall
This clearly explains what the problem is and indicates that either it is not installed or it was improperly installed. I believe a change such as this would save a lot of frustration for users who, like me, accidentally install MercurialEclipse without Mercurial.