Using git-remote-hg with bitbucket

Occasionally I want to contribute to a project using mercurial on bitbucket.org (like pylint). Since I always forget the steps, I'm documenting here how I've managed that without having to actually use mercurial.

• From bitbucket.org, log in, find the repo you want to contribute to, use the web UI to fork it under your account.
• yum install git-remote-hg
• Clone your fork using git
  • Generic format is: git clone hg::$URL
  • So for my fork of astroid, the command looks like: git clone hg::ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/crobinso/astroid
• Create a git branch, the name must start with 'branches/' to make mercurial happy when we eventually push things. So something like: git checkout -b branches/myfix
• Make your changes in the branch
• Push the branch to your repo: git push origin branches/myfix
• Use the bitbucket web UI to submit a pull request.
• That's it.

Though I haven't figured out how to update a pull request... instead I've resorted to closing the first request, creating a new branch on my fork, and submitting a brand new pull request. There's probably some nicer automagic way but I haven't figured it out.

(Hopefully in the near future more of the python ecosystem will move to git.)