Can Mercurial be made to preserve file permissions?

It looks like it can be done using hooks and an auxiliary tool (and a little chewing gum and baling wire):

1. Get David Hardeman’s Metastore, which saves and restores file metadata.

2. Alter the sources so it will ignore directory .hg as well as .git.

3. Use the following Mercurial hooks:

    precommit.meta = metastore -s
   
    changegroup.update = hg update
    update.meta   = /usr/unsup/nr/bin/metastore -a
   

You have to add the .metadata file to the repo.

This lashup will work most of the time, but if you change only permissions and want to propagate it, you’ll have to run metastore -s in order to push those changes into the .metadata file where hg will see the change; otherwise the commit thinks nothing is new.