hg copy -A and broken symlinks in Mercurial 1.4?

[Martin Geisler]

Dave Johansen <davejohansen at gmail.com> writes:

> I ran into an issue with Mercurial 1.4 (the version used in RHEL 6)
> not handling broken symlinks properly. I opened a Bugzilla against it
> which demonstrates the issue:
> http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2012-July/042289.html
>
> It appears that this is fixed in newer versions of Mercurial, so I did
> some searching through the mail archives and these seemed like the
> most likely candidates for the fixes:
> http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2012-July/042289.html
> http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2007-March/001212.html
>
> Does anyone have any input on the fix for this in Mercurial 1.4?
>
> Also, is 1.4 still being maintained so version 1.4.4 could be released with
> this fix? Or is a fix for this issue just going to have to be maintained
> downstream by RedHat?

The Mercurial project doesn't maintain old releases -- we only release
new bugfix releases (on a monthly basis) for the last major release. The
release schedule is here:

  http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/TimeBasedReleasePlan

Bugfix releases are sometimes done quicker than once per month for
important bugs, but I don't believe Matt has ever done a bugfix release
for an old version.

The reason for this is partly the usual lack of man-power to support old
releases, but also the compatibility rules Mercurial follow:

  http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CompatibilityRules

In short, it is always safe to upgrade to a new version of Mercurial.
This doesn't fit with how long-term stable distributions work, but for
users it should be easy and safe to keep up to date. Easy since you just
clone the Mercurial repo and run

  $ hg update stable
  $ make local

in the clone to get a self-contained Mercurial that you can put into
your $PATH.

-- 
Martin Geisler