Question

We’re having a compatibility problem between Mercurial and another synchronization product (MS Office Groove, now Sharepoint Workspace 2010). Basically, the “.hg” folder and “.hgignore” files are being blocked (I’ve summarized the issue with the other software).

We’ve been told that the only work-around is to change the name of the folder. Is there any way to modify Mercurial’s naming convention for the database folder and ignore file? From what I understand, I’d just need to make the names more “normal” by adding a prefix. Sort of a “Hail Mary” but thought I’d ask.

Answer 1

You can use a different file name for .hgignore (or more accurately have no .hgignore and then use an ignore= line in your hg/hgrc file to reference an additional ignore file with whatever name you want). However you can’t use an alternative name for .hg itself.

As Lasse suggests you shouldn’t be synchronizing .hg directories externally anyway. Their read/write/lock semantics are very specific and the only reading/writing to them should be via hg itself. It’s very easy to set up a cron job that automatically pushes to a backup repo as often as you’d like.