Migrating from CVS to Mercurial - how to handle cross-repo symbolic links?

Question

I have a project that is stored in CVS as numerous modules/repositories.

In several of the modules the CVS tree has symbolic links to the files in another tree. For example, the internal support tools have links to binary files (DLL, EXE) that are created and stored in the C# module.

In all cases, the files are modified only in in the module where the files exist and are treated as read-only in the tree where the symbolic link exists. More often than not, the files are pulled to machines running MSWindows so the use of symbolic links on the developer machine is not an option.

My question is this: Is there a mechanism in Mercurial that can provide the same capabilities?

Answer 1

Those common files should be considered as subRepos.

See "Mercurial Subrepos - How do you create them and how do they work?".

You will then be able to reference those "files in another tree" as a nested repository within your main development repos.