How do I install the hg-git plugin on Debian Stretch?

Question

Debian Jessie, as well as sid, have a mercurial-git package which contains the hg-git plugin. However, this package was (auto-)removed from Debian Stretch to to a release-critical bug.

But - I need it installed and running. Surely this should be possible, right?

Well, I followed the installation instructions on the plugin page:

• I ran apt-get install python-setuptools python-setuptools-git python4-setuptools python3-setuptools-git
• I ran easy_install hg-git and it seemed to work

But still, when I run various mercurial operations I get, as the first line, the error message:

*** failed to import extension hgext.git: No module named git

(regardless of whether I'm doing anything git-related or not.)

My questions:

1. Why is this happening?
2. What do I need to do in order to make the error message go away while having hggit working?

Now,

How do I correctly install dulwich to get hg-git working on Windows?

Answer 1

Apparently, that critical bug doesn't manifest always (and perhaps only under very specific circumstances), so you can try installing the Debian sid version of the mercurial-git package (that is, version 0.8.11-1 at the time of writing). There's a SuperUser question about how to do this:

https://linuxaria.com/howto/how-to-install-a-single-package-from-debian-sid-or-debian-testing

my personal opinion in this case is to simply install the .deb file, which you can get from here (it's not platform-specific; at the link you'll need to choose a mirror.) That makes the error message go away, at least assuming you have:

[extensions]
hgext.bookmarks =
hggit = 

in your ~/.hgrc file.