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
wai         


        

Answer 1

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.