Setting Mercurial's execute bit on Windows

Question

I work on a Mercurial repository that is checked out onto an Unix filesystem such as ext3 on some machines, and FAT32 on others.

In Subversion, I can set the svn:executable property to control whether a file should be marked executable when checked out on a platform that supports such a bit. I can do this regardless of the platform I'm running SVN on or the filesystem containing my working copy.

In Mercurial, I can chmod +x to get the same effect if the clone is on a Unix filesystem. But how can I set (or remove) the executable bit on a file on a FAT filesystem?

Answer 1

For the time being you cannot change the execute bit if the filesystem doesn't support it (I have plan to support it in the future).

Answer 2

Mercurial tracks the execute bit as part of the file metdata. There's no way to explictly set it in mercurial, but it tracks changes made by chmod on unix. Files added on windows will have the execute bit set by default, but the windows attrib command doesn't let you set them.

If you do a hg log -p --git you'll see the patch format that shows the altering of the execute bit, which looks like this:

$ hg log --git -p
changeset:   1:0d9a70aadc0a
tag:         tip
user:        Ry4an Brase <[email protected]>
date:        Sat Apr 24 10:05:23 2010 -0500
summary:     added execute

diff --git a/that b/that
old mode 100644
new mode 100755

changeset:   0:06e25cb66089
user:        Ry4an Brase <[email protected]>
date:        Sat Apr 24 10:05:09 2010 -0500
summary:     added no execute

diff --git a/that b/that
new file mode 100644
--- /dev/null
+++ b/that
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+this

If you're not able to get on to a unix system to set them, you could probably fake up a patch like that and hg import it, but that's definitely sub optimal.