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Mar 20, 2010 12:11 AM by
Yegor Yarko
Dave,
Welcome to TeamCity! 
1. It seems like the VCS Root connector requires the TeamCity server to do an hg identify of any repo I try to configure...
If I understand you right, you ask why the server needs to talk to Mercurial repository. This is becasue TeamCity gathers changes information (authors, files, comments) on the side of the server. This is essential for the features like displaying pending changes, viewing file diff in the web, ability to run a build on a selected change, etc. This is a core requirement and it cannot be workarounded if you use TeamCity VCS integration capabilities.
2. I love the fact that I can use variables to set up my configurations to do things like, using the configuration name, determine a directory for a branch to be checked out to. This is made even easier with the configuration template model given. However, I do not understand why I cannot use these same variables within the VCS Root configurations...
We have a feature request on this. Feel free to add your vote. This is not yet implemented because TeamCity watches the VCS roots continuously and making the VCS root change at arbitrary points does not scale well. However we are considering the feature for implementation.
3. I'm fairly certain the log isn't really displaying everything that's happening. For example, I currently have a hanging bug when I try to use one of our Mac agents to clone over http. If I do this manually from the Mac console, I can see exactly where it is hanging. However, if I do this in TeamCity, I only see a line being given from TeamCity rather than the straight stdout. Am I missing something here?
The build log is focused ont he build activity while the details of VCS-related activity are usually hidden form the user. See logs/teamcity-vcs.log (on the server if you use server-side checkout and on agent otherwise) to get more details on what's happening. If you believe there is a bug or we can improve the progress reporting, feel free to create an issue in our tracker wth appropriate details, attached logs, etc.
BTW, if you can sum up and publish differences between Parabuild and TeamCity after some time using TeamCity, that can be a great resource for users considring different options while choosing their CI server.
Thanks for the quick response! 
If I understand you right, you ask why the server needs to talk to Mercurial repository. This is becasue TeamCity gathers changes information (authors, files, comments) on the side of the server. This is essential for the features like displaying pending changes, viewing file diff in the web, ability to run a build on a selected change, etc. This is a core requirement and it cannot be workarounded if you use TeamCity VCS integration capabilities.
Actually, this part makes total sense, so let me ask the question a different way. Is there any way to tell the server how it should connect to the Mercurial repository and make that a separate method of calling than the way I want my agent to call it? If this was possible, I'd be able to get the server to contact the repo via http like it should, while still allowing my Mac agent to contact the repo via ssh.
We have a feature request on this. Feel free to add your vote. This is not yet implemented because TeamCity watches the VCS roots continuously and making the VCS root change at arbitrary points does not scale well. However we are considering the feature for implementation.
Eh, I'm not holding out hope for a feature that was requested 2 years ago and has an answer that won't work with Mercurial repositories. In theory the use of checkout rules looks good, but when you try to do a VCS Root connection test against hg.example.com/branches it will fail, because only the repositories at hg.example.com/branches/repo1 and hg.example.com/branches/repo2 are seen by TeamCity as actual hg repositories. I suppose then my question has to be re-formed here as well. Is there a way to make the checkout rules do what I need for a Mercurial repository; whether it be by allowing the VCS Root to seem connectable to the repo's parent directory or by "peeling back" what it thinks it's trying to check out and redirect to a different, specified repository. I'll be sure to add to the feature request thread.
The build log is focused ont he build activity while the details of VCS-related activity are usually hidden form the user. See logs/teamcity-vcs.log (on the server if you use server-side checkout and on agent otherwise) to get more details on what's happening. If you believe there is a bug or we can improve the progress reporting, feel free to create an issue in our tracker wth appropriate details, attached logs, etc.
I will. It should be an option to see the direct stdout as the TC log IMHO.
BTW, if you can sum up and publish differences between Parabuild and TeamCity after some time using TeamCity, that can be a great resource for users considring different options while choosing their CI server.
Possibly. I don't have much time on my hands these days so no guarantees; especially with my current inability to use VCS Roots the way I need. Does the fact that Mercurial is technically a TC plug-in means I should be discussing its problems over in the plug-in forum?
Just in case I don't have to ask there, I have one more question for here. How exactly does TC check against Mercurial repositories to see if there are any changes made? Under Parabuild (which does not natively support Mercurial but does support generic VCS manipulation) we have our own scripts which need to check against a repo's RSS feed in order to see if there are new changes made. One of the nice things about this is that the whole process is transparent to us, the not-so-nice thing being that we are the ones who needed to build and still maintain the scripts.
Thanks again for the fast response! Much appreciated.