hg clone fails after adding subrepos

Question

I have a problem with my mercurial main repo. My colleague created a bunch of subrepositories for dependancies, and since then, I can't update my local repo. I decided to try a checkout in an empty directory but I have the same error :

hg clone https://user@bitbucket.org/company/repo
http authorization required
realm: Bitbucket.org HTTP
user: user
password:
destination directory: repo
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1116 changesets with 12636 changes to 2410 files
updating to branch default
cloning subrepo deps/gtest from https://bitbucket.org/company/gtest.git
abort: Le fichier spÚcifiÚ est introuvable

"Le fichier spÚcifiÚ est introuvable" means "The specified file cannot be found", but the message is in french so it must come from Windows, because if it came from hg it would be in english

Here is what I have when using the --debug option

updating: .hgignore 1/1274 files (0.08%)
getting .hgignore
updating: .hgsub 2/1274 files (0.16%)
getting .hgsub
updating: .hgsubstate 3/1274 files (0.24%)
getting .hgsubstate
subrepo merge 000000000000+ 4d1310a16bfd 000000000000+
  subrepo deps/gtest: remote added, get https://bitbucket.org/springbeats/gtest.git:a6772271f71672e889776bfe49ec4efd9da036df:git
cloning subrepo deps/gtest from https://bitbucket.org/company/gtest.git
deps/gtest: git clone https://bitbucket.org/company/gtest.git C:\Users\Bob\Documents\Newdir\repo\deps/gtest
abort: Le fichier spÚcifiÚ est introuvable

Does anyone has an idea of what going on ?

Answer 1

Indeed, the problem was that hg couldn't find git. I just realized that git wasn't on my PATH, so I fixed that and everything worked.

The solution was easy but the error message wasn't clear.

Answer 2

Main problem here is Bitbucket, which (nobody in Mercurial-hosting world really) can't support and handle nested repositories (and subrepos for the same reason), not the Git-nature of subrepos. For BB subrepos can be only siblings of superrepo

In order to avoid such type of problems, you have to use additional [subpaths] hack, described on Subrepository Wiki-page for Mercurial 2.* and in this message originally