Mercurial HG Update Exited With Status 255

Question

When remotely updating a Mercurial Repository, I am getting the following error from the hg update command that is being run on the remote server after the push. I looked around online for some help for this however was unsuccessful in finding anything useful. At this point, I am hoping for some ideas and / or insight as to what would be causing this problem.

The error is just below. It occurred when pushing two changesets. One changeset included an unrelated index.html file change. The other changeset was a merge, which included the index.html change as well as the renaming of the two image files.

levinaris@server01:/home/web/repository$ hg push
pushing to ssh://10.10.1.12//home/web/repository
searching for changes`remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 2 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files
remote: abort: Operation not permitted: /home/web/repository/html/images/image.gif
remote: warning: changegroup hook exited with status 255

Additional details:

• Both images are 10385 bytes in size. (yes, this error occurs on two images I have)

• The two images had their names changed in changesets that were already pushed and hg updated due to case-folding collisions when attempting to pull the repositories down to Windows PCs.

• The target server has the following hook in /etc/mercurial/hgrc:

  [hooks]
  changegroup = hg update

• As a work-around, I did the following:

  1. Deleted image.gif.
  2. Deleted another image file that produced the error.
  3. Ran hg update - success!
  4. Ran hg revert html/image/image.gif
  5. Ran hg revert html/image/otherimage.gif

At this point, I am trying to better understand the cause of this problem, so that I can ensure a solid, easy-to-use implementation in my environment. I really appreciate your help!!

---

After using hg --debug update in the hook, I received this output:

levinaris@server01:/home/web/repository$ hg push
pushing to /home/web/staging/repository
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 2 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files
resolving manifests
 overwrite False partial False
 ancestor 58a5edb95c9a local 58a5edb95c9a+ remote 3aafb97b148c
  searching for copies back to rev 6
 html/index.php: remote is newer -> g
 html/images/otherimage.gif.casefolding: update permissions -> e
 html/images/image.gif: update permissions -> e
abort: Operation not permitted: /home/web/staging/repository/html/images/image.gif
warning: changegroup hook exited with status 255

Additional Permission Information:

• All 3 files in the 2 changesets have 775 permission with the webuser:dev user:group.

• My Global hgrc file has the webuser trusted

  [trusted]
  users = webuser

Solution

Is it possible that the permissions that file on the server were such that it couldn't be overwitten by the person doing the push?

If, for example, two different people have done that push (and thus update) the second person isn't going to be able to overwrite the files created by the first person's push triggered update.

Maybe try changing the hook to this for a test (you don't actually have those single quotes on your hook, right?):

[hooks]
changegroup = hg --debug update

If it is a permissions issue the usual fix is to put everyone who will be pushing and updating into the same group (I call mine 'hg') and then using the sticky group bit on all the directories in the repo to make sure new files have that group.