Using Mercurial on the Andrew File System (AFS)
While AFS provides a POSIX-like interface that is suitable for usage with Mercurial, there are a few details that may surprise casual users.
1. Hardlinks
Because AFS treats every subdirectory as a new filesystem, it is only possible to hardlink between files that exist in the same directory. This prevents the clone command from creating hardlinks, though it should automatically fall back to copying the data.
2. Mercurial and AFS ACLs
In order to use Mercurial with a working directory on an AFS filesystem, the working directory and all directories under it (including the repository, .hg) are accessible by the user. This means that for read-only operations like status, these directories must have at least 'rl' in their ACLs. For operations that change history or lock the repository, at least 'rliw' must be in the ACL list for the working directory and 'rliwd' in the ACL list for the repository (to delete lock files).
To perform read-only operations on a remote repository stored in AFS, 'l' must be in the ACL lists for the parent directory of the repository and 'rl' in the ACL list for the repository itself. Writing to a remote repository requires the same ACLs as when writing to a repository whose working directory is in AFS.
3. Interactions with Extensions
It is known that some extensions interact poorly with AFS: