Mercurial stuck "waiting for lock"

Question

Got a bluescreen in windows while cloning a mercurial repository.

After reboot, I now get this message for almost all hg commands:

c:\src\>hg commit
waiting for lock on repository c:\src\McVrsServer held by '\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\
x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'
interrupted!

Google is no help.

Any tips?

Solution 1

When "waiting for lock on repository", delete the repository file: .hg/wlock (or it may be in .hg/store/lock)

When deleting the lock file, you must make sure nothing else is accessing the repository. (If the lock is a string of zeros or blank, this is almost certainly true).

Solution 2

When waiting for lock on working directory, delete .hg/wlock.

Solution 3

I had this problem with no detectable lock files. I found the solution here: http://schooner.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/bin/view/MAG/HgLockError

Here is a transcript from Tortoise Hg Workbench console

% hg debuglocks
lock:  user None, process 7168, host HPv32 (114213199s)
wlock: free
[command returned code 1 Sat Jan 07 18:00:18 2017]
% hg debuglocks --force-lock
[command completed successfully Sat Jan 07 18:03:15 2017]
cmdserver: Process crashed
PaniniDev% hg debuglocks
% hg debuglocks
lock:  free
wlock: free
[command completed successfully Sat Jan 07 18:03:30 2017]

After this the aborted pull ran sucessfully.

The lock had been set more than 2 years ago, by a process on a machine that is no longer on the LAN. Shame on the hg developers for a) not documenting locks adequately; b) not timestamping them for automatic removal when they get stale.

Solution 4

Coworker had this exact problem today, after a BSoD while trying to push. He had to:

• delete the file .hg/store/lock (as per the accepted answer)
• delete the file .hg/store/phaseroots (as per this TortoiseHG bug report)

Then his repo worked again.

EDIT: As per @Marmoute's comment - when dealing with lock-related issues, using hg debuglock is a safer alternative to blindly deleting the .hg/store/lock file.

Solution 5

I am very familiar with Mercurial's locking code (as of 1.9.1). The above advice is good, but I'd add that:

1. I've seen this in the wild, but rarely, and only on Windows machines.
2. Deleting lock files is the easiest fix, BUT you have to make sure nothing else is accessing the repository. (If the lock is a string of zeros, this is almost certainly true).

(For the curious: I haven't yet been able to catch the cause of this problem, but suspect it's either an older version of Mercurial accessing the repository or a problem in Python's socket.gethostname() call on certain versions of Windows.)

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