hg copy -A and broken symlinks in Mercurial 1.4?

[Dave Johansen]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
<jordigh at octave.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2013-09-12 at 08:08 -0700, Dave Johansen wrote:
>
> > Like mentioned, RHEL is a long term support release and people use
> > it for the stability. They like the fact that they can still use the
> > same predictable version of software instead of it changing
> > underneath them every few weeks/months.
>
> We know what RHEL is like. And hg is one of the most stable pieces of
> software out there ever. Mercurial's devotion to backwards
> compatibility is incredible. Just backport a newer hg to RHEL
> whatever. It's not difficult, and our local sysadmins here do it all
> the time. If you need help, I can probably even provide you with the
> relevant RPMs.
>
> Or you can refuse our long term support and just keep your very stable
> bugs. Your choice.

I understand that and I'm not complaining about Mercurial. Yes, the
compatibility of the interface is backwards compatible, but the issue
is that the on disk format does change. So what happens when some guy
accidentally does a commit on one of my machines with the newer
version of Mercurial, but then still wants to use it on the machine
with the vanilla install? Yes, I know that you can usually put values
in the .hgrc to prevent that sort of thing, but even with that someone
is going to forget to have those values and make an irreversible
change to their repo at sometime.

Basically, maybe it's not true for you, but there's value in
consistency to some people and for some people that consistency needs
to be maintained across a wide array of machines that may not be able
to be updated unless through official channels.