Installing Mercurial on Windows Apache XAMPP Tutorial

Question

After asking this question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2675764/xampp-mercurial-installation-on-windows-apache-hgwebdir-cgi-script-error) and reading though the whole internet including this question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/644322/how-do-i-get-mercurials-hgwebdir-working-on-windows) and all its links for about 10 hours, I seem to not be able to find a solution. I begun with this tutorial http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HgWebDirStepByStep ... and I really don't want to install ancient versions of Mercurial. I got my windows-apache to run Python scripts, CGI-Scripts, publish them in the wild, but hgwebdir just won't work.

Question 1:

Can someone please enrich his personal blog with a tutorial on how to install MERCURIAL on a WINDOWS XAMPP installation and make it visible to the world? I guarantee a lot of pageviews, as this is not a trivial problem. And this would sincerely help a lot of other people I guess.

Question 2:

For example, even after browsing half a day through everywhere, I just cannot find out, which version of python I need to pair with the freshest version of mercurial, and I get the "magic number is wrong"-error. This would be my question, if noone has time to make up a nice blogpost. Sorry for being a bit frustrated.

Answer 1

Okay, after all it was just a whole lot of directory-location-problems and a big version-problem (needed to use Python 2.6 with Mercurial 1.5.1). Got it working now. If I happen to write a full windows-guide, I'll add a comment.

Answer 2

I recently encountered this problem - with the added complication of supporting TortoiseHG. I posted a tutorial on my blog describing how to host multiple Mercurial repositories on a Windows XP machine using XAMPP and TortoiseHG.

http://makinggames.ca/dev/version-control-mercurial-apache-tortoisehg/