Problem running mercurial against symlinked .hgrc file under Cygwin/Windows 7

Question

This is not a question about handling symlinks in the mercurial repository.

I have this setup at work where I keep my dotfiles in a separate directory (.configuration) that I can use to synch my dotfiles between cygwin/windows and linux, then use symlinks instead of dotfiles in the home directory.

So, I have the symlink ~/.hgrc -> .configuration/.hgrc in my home directory. After setting this up, mercurial complains thus:

$ hg st
hg: config error at C:\Users\aaf\.hgrc:1: '!<symlink>ÿþ.configuration/.hgrc'

Removing the symlink and replacing it with the actual file works, so the contents of the .hgrc file are not at fault. I can live with that, I suppose, but I'd like to know why this happens. All other tools I've configured the same way work great with symlinked dotfiles.

Answer 1

If you cannot get this to work with a symlink, you might want to try a hardlink. Then just make sure, when you edit the file, to change the contents of the file and not move a new one on top of the old, which breaks the hardlink.