Installation is a pain, instructions are not complete
You have to understand that, from a user's perspective, installation of thg (and of any other software for that matter) should be as easy as either of these:
- download a file and execute it, or
- copy and paste no more than two or three commands into a terminal.
If it has to be any more complicated than that, then give a reliable and easy to follow set of instructions that one can follow without having to become an expert in Python, its modules and package frameworks, and whatnot.
I don't give a damn about python, I don't want to install python 2 if I'm using python 3 or viceversa, I don't want to have to figure out how to use pip, I shouldn't even have to know that thg is made in python, that's your business, not mine.
So, now I am on a brand new laptop where I freshly installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. There I installed mercurial with zypper.
Then I googled "TortoiseHG" and clicked on the first result which led me here: https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/
Next I click on the big "Download" button which leads me here:
https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/download/linux.html
My distro (OpenSUSE) is not listed, so I read the "From Source" which says:
If no package yet exists for your platform, then use the source installing method described on the thg page
where "the thg page" links here: https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg/-/wikis/thg
It says:
- Install Mercurial (consult the chart at ReleaseNotes for version info)
- Clone the TortoiseHg repository:
- Symlink the thg script into your path:
Note that all the commands to copy and paste are missing, BTW.
That is usually all you have to do
Yeah, right.
The first thing I got when trying to run the thg
executable was an error telling me that the command python
was not found.
I was going to install python but then realized I already have python 3.8 installed on my system, so I symlinked /usr/bin/python3
to /usr/bin/python
, so now the python
command executes python 3.
At https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg/-/wikis/thg it doesn't say that you should use python 2 rather than 3, it just says:
TortoiseHg should work on Python 2.4** or later**
so python 3.8 should be fine. Also, on my older laptop I've been running thg on python 3 for months now without any issue (after a nightmare process that took me several days to get it to work after the upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 wiped out my preexisting perfectly working older install of thg, just during the period when thg's obsolete official site had been taken down and before it was redirected to the new one - so it took me a few days to discover that thg wasn't just completely abandoned)
So again, python3 should be fine.
So now, with python
symninked to the python3
binary, I tried running thg again, and of course I get:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PyQT5'
I look back at https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg/-/wikis/thg and it does say, at the very bottom of the page:
We require a minimum PyQt version of 4.6
Ok, well, then first, why did you say:
- Install Mercurial (consult the chart at ReleaseNotes for version info)
- Clone the TortoiseHg repository:
- Symlink the thg script into your path:
That is usually all you have to do
No, presumably you will usually also have to install PyQt, so that should be added to the list.
And secondly, at least give me a link or some hint about how to proceed with that.
I have no idea what PyQt is, and while I love to learn new things, I'll educate myself on the topic at another time; now I was installing TortoiseHG and I expected to be able to do so in a few minutes by just executing a handful of commands, without having to google a bunch of other things.