UTF-8 Byte order marks inserted by hg merge

[Brian Wallis]

First I should state that I am still investigating this problem and am  
still a little unsure as to what happened.

We have a user on Linux (Suse 10.3) running Mercurial 1.0.1 and  
another on Windows Vista running TortoiseHg 0.4 each of who were  
working on some changes on a branch. When it came time to merge, the  
user on Windows pulled the changes from the other repository and  
merged the two heads. The merged result seemed to be slightly  
corrupted in that there were three extra characters added to the front  
of a few files. These were (in hex) EF BB BF which are the byte order  
marker for UTF-8.

Two of the files in question were merged without conflict and the  
third required a conflict resolution for which Beyond Compare 3 was  
configured and used. These leads me to think that it was mercurial  
that inserted the marks, not some other windows tool.

Looking at the two parent revisions of the files shows no Byte Order  
Marks in the files. I am going to attempt to reproduce the problem  
tomorrow in another similarly configured Windows Vista machine.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

thanks,

Brian Wallis
InfoMedix
p: 3 8615 4553 | f: 3 8615 4501 | e: brian.wallis at infomedix.com.au
Level 5, 451 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000