hg clone fails with abort: could not symlink to

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 05:03:58PM -0800, Kishore Vasudeva wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We have been using Mercurial(version 1.1.2) as SCM for all our 
> products/components for more than a year. Recently, one of our developer 
> pushed a changeset to the one of the products repo's and since then we 
> have been unable to clone or pull from this repository. Here's the details:
> 
> hg clone http://mercurial.sfbay.sun.com:1236/hgwebdir.cgi/im8 im8_problem
> requesting all changes
> adding changesets
> adding manifests
> adding file changes
> added 9969 changesets with 34706 changes to 7475 files
> updating working directory
> abort: could not symlink to

[long text deleted]
...

Symlinks pointers are stored as normal text, plus a flag bit. On
Windows, users will see a symlink as a normal file containing the link
pointer. So what's happened here is some Windows user has helpfully
'fixed' the contents of the symlink file by copying the pointed to
file's contents to it. To fix it, simply clone on Windows and replace
the symlink file context with the pointer text (probably with hg
revert).

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.