In mercurial 2.1, the pull and incoming commands now have return code 1 when there are no changes. So is there now an alternative command with which I can on the command line do something like the next?
hg pull && echo "No changes, carry on."
Case in point: checkoutmanager now complains that something went wrong when updating a mercurial checkout, when in reality there were simply no changes: https://bitbucket.org/reinout/checkoutmanager/issue/17
See the mercurial 2.1 release notes, that mention this for pull (but not for incoming).
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/UpgradeNotes#A2.1:_phases.2C_various_minor_changes
That return code change will be reverted for the next minor release.
See: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2012-February/037986.html