Can a Mercurial subrepostiory reside in a subfolde

Question

I used the have the following line in my .hgsub for years:

setup/help = https://my.repo.com/manuals

It would place the repository named "manuals" into a folder help inside another folder setup. So my parent repository structure looks like this:

.hg
setup
|__help
|  |__.hg
|
.hgsub

This was no problem until I updated to Mercurial 4.9 today, it now says: "subrepo path contains illegal component: setup/help", and I can't even commit to the main repo. Does Mercurial forbid this now? Is there a valid .hgsub syntax to make this work? I don't want to move help to be a direct child of the main project folder. My previous Mercurial version was 4.5, it's not like I was using ancient tools...

Error traceback as per the request:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mercurial\scmutil.pyo", line 165, in callcatch
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 367, in _runcatchfunc
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 1021, in _dispatch
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 756, in runcommand
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 1030, in _runcommand
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 1018, in <lambda>
  File "mercurial\util.pyo", line 1670, in check
  File "mercurial\commands.pyo", line 4621, in push
  File "mercurial\context.pyo", line 277, in sub
  File "mercurial\subrepo.pyo", line 164, in subrepo
  File "mercurial\subrepo.pyo", line 414, in __init__
Abort: subrepo path contains illegal component: setup/help
abort: subrepo path contains illegal component: setup/help

Answer 1

How confident are you with a Python debugger? You can launch the command with the --debugger this time.

You might see an output like this:

entering debugger - type c to continue starting hg or h for help
--Call--
> /usr/lib64/python2.7/contextlib.py(21)__exit__()
-> def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
(Pdb)

Enter c and enter until you see the same traceback as the one you pasted.

When you are at the right traceback, you can print the local variables using pp root, pp util.expandpath(root) and os.path.realpath(util.expandpath(root)). We should be able to get to the root of the issue with the values of those variables.

To exit the debugger, enter q and enter.

Answer 2

I had the same error, so I cloned the mercurial repository...

The error was introduced in tagged version 4.9, subrepo.py.

It was corrected about a month later, revision 41583 (87a6e3c953e045d92147925fc71aad7c327fdbfd). I tested it on the actual default branch, works again!

So, no need for a bug entry, we just have to wait for the next release.