How to treat a symbolic link as a directory in Mercurial?

mercurial symlink
D R picture D R · Dec 25, 2009 · Viewed 10.5k times · Source

As of 0.9.4, when adding a symbolic link Mercurial keeps track of the link itself, and not the file or directories it points to. However, there are cases when it is desirable to keep track of the files pointed to by the symbolic link.

How can I force Mercurial to treat the symbolic link to a directory as a regular directory?

Answer

Rage Steel picture Rage Steel · Jun 10, 2010

Under linux you can use 

mount --bind sourcepath targetpath

instead of symbolic links and mercurial will treat target as usual directory (tested on openSUSE 11.2 with Mercurial 1.3.1, and on RHEL6).

The alternative syntax, amenable for inclusion in /etc/fstab, is

mount -o bind sourcepath targetpath

The fstab entry is, then

sourcepath targetpath none defaults,bind 0 0

Related questions

What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?

I've been using git for some time now on Windows (with msysGit) and I like the idea of distributed source control. Just recently I've been looking at Mercurial (hg) and it looks interesting. However, I can't wrap my head around …

Read More
How to save username and password with Mercurial?

I used Mercurial in a personal project, and I have been typing my username and password every time I want to push something to the server. I tried adding the following to the .hgrc file in my home directory, but …

Read More
Mercurial — revert back to old version and continue from there

I'm using Mercurial locally for a project (it's the only repo there's no pushing/pulling to/from anywhere else). To date it's got a linear history. However, the current thing I'm working on I've now realized is a terrible approach …

Read More