I created a Mercurial instance under the global configuration. I then enabled "install automatically". I then configured a job to use this Mercurial instance on an Ubuntu slave node.

When I run the job, it fails with:

$ /usr/bin/hg clone --rev default --noupdate https://host.com/hg/gstreamer-android/ /home/builds/.jenkins/workspace/GStreamer_Android_snapshot
ERROR: Failed to clone https://host.com/hg/gstreamer-android/ because hg could not be found; check that you've properly configured your Mercurial installation
ERROR: Failed to clone https://host.com/hg/gstreamer-android/

Sure enough, /usr/bin/hg does not exist yet the tool auto-installer is not kicking in.

The Mercurial auto-installer has two sub-options:

1. Extract .zip/.tar.gz
2. Run command

I don't know how where to get the Mercurial binaries for Ubuntu in *.zip or *.tar.gz form (the sources are posted online, but not the binaries). As for "run command" I know "sudo apt-get install mercurial" will work but this requires root access and I cannot grant Jenkins root access, for security reasons.

Please explain how this is supposed to work. Is this a bug or am I misunderstanding how to configure this?