Trouble installing on Debian - abort: there is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)

[AlexandraThorn]

I'm trying to install purple-rocketchat on Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster), and after cloning the git repository, I keep getting this error when I try to run make:

abort: there is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)

How do I troubleshoot this?

I have already confirmed installation of:
discount
libmarkdown2-dev
libpurple
libpurple-dev
libjson-glib
libjson-glib-dev
libglib
mercurial

Thanks,
Alex

[sgsax]

At the start of the Makefile, hg is used to get a version number from the local mercurial repo. Since there is no actual mercurial repo anymore, probably since moving to git and github, hg throws the error. It is hg that is aborting, not the build process. There is a bit of error handling in the Makefile to work around this. It doesn't seem to impact the rest of the build process, and the library compiles without errors, just a few gcc warnings. I've just built it successfully from a new pull on Ubuntu 20.04 and using it with Pidgin 2.13. It should be safe to ignore this message.