Mercurial error: abort no username supplied

Question

Problem on WindowsXP (likely will happen on all Win installs), first time using Mercurial. I found the answer in an inobvious place so I\'m asking/answering the question myself

Answer 1

I'm sorry, but why do you call this a problem? Mercurial asks you to see hg help config, and this help text explicitly tells you how to add a username -- I know since I wrote that help text :-)

How should we improve the error message to make this more clear?

Edit: Since I wrote this in 2010, we've managed to screw this up by making hg help config include help for all config settings. So the nice little example of how to set the username:

[ui]
username = Your Name 

is now lost in the noise (add this to ~/.hgrc, creating the file if necessary). I've opened an issue for this.