Mercurial integration with SVN.

I've recently been evaluating integration of SVN with some other distributed source control systems, mainly Git and Mercurial. The idea is to have a distributed source control system that would integrate seamlessly with a central SVN repository (very slow and painfull access over internet). That allows a certain number of things, amongst which there is fast access to commit history, cheap branches to experiment...

At some point I had both Mercurial and Git installed, and decided it was time to do a bit of cleanup. I have a bias towards Mercurial because it has a better integration in Windows explorer through TortoiseHG (you can call that lazyness).

After uninstalling everything I started clean, installed the latest TortoiseHG version (which btw has a very nice GUI), as well as hgsubversion as explained here: Getting started with HGSubversion

Mercurial was working fine but I was running into the following error each time I tried to clone our repo:

hg clone svn+ssh://myuser@myrepo.com/someotherpath
destination directory: someotherpath
abort: Can't create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified.


That error message has been driving me nuts for a while, and after trying a lot of things (uninstalling everything, installing Git again, checking library versions ...), I stumbled upon the solution :

set SVN_SSH="C:\\Program Files\\PuTTY\\plink.exe"


As simple as that... Just define that variable SVN_SSH and it worked flowlessly. After that I justed defined it in my user environment to make it persist.

Hopefully this will help someone else.