We have a Mercurial repository converted from Subversion a while ago and have today noticed that there are files in the repository that have no history whatsoever.
One of the sympomts of this behaviour is that hg status reports the file as clean, while hg log reports no changesets for the same file:
> hg clone [repo]
> hg st -c FileWithMissingHistory.cs
C FileWithMissingHistory.cs
> hg blame FileWithMissingHistory.cs
FileWithMissingHistory.cs: no such file in rev [...]
> hg log FileWithMissingHistory.cs
> hg log FileWithMissingHistory.cs -f
abort: cannot follow nonexistent file: "FileWithMissingHistory.cs"
> hg log -v | grep FileWithMissingHistory.cs
[gives output, there arechangesets mentioning the file]
Obviously the filenames have been changed in the example. I’ve tried using hg verify, but this command reports that the repo is fine. Has anyone experienced this and is there anything we could do to bring the history “back to life”? Placing dummy history on the files in question would be acceptable, but suboptimal.
EDIT:
I’ve done some more investigation and noticed that “FileWithMissingHistory.cs” was renamed from another filename (hg copy + delete) in revision 238. If I do hg update -r238 and hg log on the file at this revision I do not get any history. Doing hg log on the original file reports the history as expected, so it seems that the history is somehow lost during copy (again, the file is renamed using hg copy, and the changeset clearly indicates that the file has been copied).
I’ve finally tracked down the cause of the effects mentioned above and it seems that this is caused by mixed casing issues. Some of the files are located in directories with lowercase names while others are located in the directories with equal names, only that the case is mixed (e.g. “directory/FileWithHistory.cs” and “DiReCtOrY/FileWithMissingHistory.cs”). On Windows, both files will be located in the same directory causing issues.