hg clone fails with abort: could not symlink to

[Kishore Vasudeva]

>>
>> 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).
>
>   
These are the platforms used by our developers:
- Ubuntu Linux
- S10 sparc and x86
- Mac OS X 10.6.2

We do not use Windows platform for development or as server for central 
source repo.

Here's some additional information:

The problem occurred in 3 files:
commssuite/im/l10n/l10nsrc/{ko, zh, 
zh_TW}/src/com/iplanet/im/client/help/index.html

In all of these files, Hg showed the content to be a single line 
"toc.html". The file on disk(viewed in an editor or cat) on mac showed 
proper html content, though hg annotate showed the single line. 
Modifying the file and hg diff'ing gives a diff against the single line. 
On Linux system, both Hg and the file on disk showed the same content, 
one line "toc.html". It may be worth noting that the files contain 
Unicode text (in Korean or Chinese).

-Kishore


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