hg copy -A and broken symlinks in Mercurial 1.4?

[Dave Johansen]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:35 AM, Augie Fackler <lists at durin42.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 12:22 AM, Dave Johansen <davejohansen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> Is there a reason you can't upgrade to a version that's not over three years
> old? A build of hg from that long ago certainly has a large number of fixed
> bugs[0] and is missing a ton of useful modern features.
>
> http://pkgs.repoforge.org/mercurial/ looks helpful if you don't want to roll
> your own (I picked the first result from Google, so you may want to check
> the validity of those packages).
>
> [0]: Using revsets (an awesome feature you're missing, BTW), `hg log -r
> '1.4.3::@ and grep("issue[0-9]+")' --template '{node}\n' | wc -l` suggests
> you're missing over 800 bugfixes. And that's just ones that had a bug
> attached to the changeset correctly.

That's an interesting number and it sounds nice, but how many of those
actually existed in 1.4? I'm sure that some still exist in 1.4, but
I'm guessing a significant number were bug fixes to features that were
added after 1.4 or for changes that caused a regression that doesn't
exist in 1.4. I know that getting that sort of number is VERY
difficult, if not impossible, but I think that that statement of "over
800 bugfixes" has debatable value when talking about 1.4 specifically.