Mercurial HG 'pretxncommit.whitespace hook exited with status 1' but no hook specified

Question

the title of this request says it all pretty much. I have no hooks defined in my .hgrc file, but I am getting this rollback message on running hg commit:

transaction abort!
rollback completed
abort: pretxncommit.whitespace hook exited with status 1

my hgrc file looks like this:

[paths]
default = 'the_address'

[ui]
username = 'my name and email address'
verbose = True

[extensions]
mq =

[diff]
git = 1
unified = 8

Just in case it is important. I am using Mercurial on Ubuntu 12.04 and I am trying to combine it with using a XAMPP installation (Apache friends) in the /opt/ directory, so I always have to run sudo before doing a commit.

Looking through SO and searching on the web, I found that this error is due to a hook with regard to trailing whitespace in the code (Compare this part of Mercurial: The definitive guide and also this SO entry on hooks). Strangely enough, I haven't defined this hook anywhere, so I also don't know how to remove it.

Any help in sorting this out would be appreciated. Thanks guys.

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EDIT: Incorporating what smooth reggae suggested, I put a hgrc file in the home folder and the root folder and I adjusted the hgrc file in etc/mercurial just to find out what the deal with this problem is.

I am not sure, how much more information debug = True should give, but I didn't get particularly much. At the beginning of the commit message, I see the following now:

could not import hgext.hgext.mq (No module named hgext.mq): trying hgext.mq
could not import hgext.hgext.transplant (No module named hgext.transplant): trying hgext.transplant

So, this means, it can't find these two files, but why?

Thanks again for all your help.

EDIT2: Please note that the first EDIT is an unrelated issue and can be ignored for this particular question.

Answer 1

can you add debug = True under [ui] in your .hgrc file? That will give you some more output, which might offer some insight into the location of this hook