Mercurial, SSH, and a local install

I have the latest and greatest version of Mercurial on my laptop but the other machines I want to 'push' to over ssh are either a shared host without Mercurial installed or are pinned to a release of a distro that has a very old version of Mercurial. This means that I had to $ make install-home, which leaves me with a problem, which is that the installed Mercurial files won't be on my Python path when I ssh in. That means I see this when I ssh in from my laptop:

$ ssh bitworking.org /home/jcgregorio/bin/hg
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/jcgregorio/bin/hg", line 14, in ?
    from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()
ImportError: No module named mercurial
~
$ 

The easiest way I found to fix this to add the following two lines to the beginning of ~/bin/hg on the server:

import sys
sys.path.append('/home/jcgregorio/lib/python')

Then I need to specify the exact location of hg from the command line on the laptop, so it uses my locally installed version on the server:

$ hg push --remotecmd ~/bin/hg ssh://bitworking.org/myproject/

That --remotecmd can be made to go away if I add it to the config file for the project on the laptop. I created the file .hg/hgrc and added the following lines:

[ui]
remotecmd = ~/bin/hg

Now I can finally run:

$ hg push ssh://bitworking.org/myproject/