Soft link in Mercurial

Question

Is there some equivalent in Mercurial to NIX soft- or hard- links to directories or files.

Basically that a file (or directory) is linked to a file \"somewhere else\

Answer 1

Path auditing on *nix

On *nix systems, hg Mercurial audits symbolic links ("symlinks") for referred path security. For example, absolute and empty paths are considered unsafe and will therefore not be added to the repository.

Mercurial developers have not documented this feature. However, the source code contains a comment with a somewhat vague explanation:

class pathauditor(object):
    '''ensure that a filesystem path contains no banned components.
    the following properties of a path are checked:

    - ends with a directory separator
    - under top-level .hg
    - starts at the root of a windows drive
    - contains ".."
    - traverses a symlink (e.g. a/symlink_here/b)
    - inside a nested repository (a callback can be used to approve
      some nested repositories, e.g., subrepositories)
    '''

On Windows, symbolic links are not supported for various reasons, see:

• https://www.mercurial-scm.org/bts/issue1825
• https://www.mercurial-scm.org/bts/issue2579