repository seemingly corrupted after "abort: Operation not permitted: 'path_to_directory' "

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2013-08-08 at 18:29 +0200, j. van den hoff wrote:
> hi list,
> 
> first time in several years of (not too fancy) hg usage that seemingly  
> something really bad happened.
> 
> a) the setup:
> I have a repository (purely local, not connected to any other repo, backup  
> is done otherwise...) containing a modestly deep file tree with some  
> hundred files, mostly shell scripts. the repo is 3 years old with some 500  
> revisions over all. over time there has been substantial restructuring
> done, all with `hg mv'  as far as I recall. moreover, there are a bunch of  
> untracked files in the tree (test files etc.)
> 
> b) problem 1 (the small one):
> when trying to do `hg up' to some quite old revision I get an abort due to  
> some untracked file not matching to earlier state of repo (to something to  
> that extent). question: what is that about? why does mercurial care about  
> some untracked file at all and does not leave it alone?

You asked it to do something that would have overwritten the file.
Mercurial can't distinguish "extremely valuable but haven't checked in
yet" from "worthless".

> c) problem 2 (the BIG one):
> after getting rid of problem 1 I restored the repo + working copy from  
> yesterdays backup (just to make sure that I start over with a definitely  
> uncorrupted setup) and tried again to `hg up' to the old revision. this  
> failed with "abort: Operation not permitted: 'path_to_directory'"

Do this again with --traceback and send us the full output.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.