Mercurial node is not well formed error message

[Daniel J Sebald]

I started seeing a message from hg that I'm not familiar with.  I had 
version 25200 on my system, then tried


@linux ~/octave/octave/octave $ hg incoming
comparing with http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave
searching for changes
all local heads known remotely
changeset:   25201:c80323fe4938
branch:      stable
address@hidden, line 111: node '<<<<<<<' is not well formed
address@hidden, line 113: cannot parse entry
address@hidden, line 115: node '>>>>>>>' is not well formed
user:        John W. Eaton <address@hidden>
date:        Tue Apr 10 22:22:37 2018 -0400
files:       libinterp/corefcn/load-save.cc libinterp/corefcn/symrec.h 
libinterp
description:
improve handling of global symbols (bug #53599)


which also appears when pull


@linux ~/octave/octave/octave $ hg pull
pulling from http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave
searching for changes
all local heads known remotely
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 20 changesets with 33 changes to 21 files
updating bookmark @
(run 'hg update' to get a working copy)
@linux ~/octave/octave/octave $ address@hidden, line 111: node 
'<<<<<<<' is not well formed
address@hidden, line 113: cannot parse entry
address@hidden, line 115: node '>>>>>>>' is not well formed


My .hgtags file looks fine on the stable branch.  However, I'm looking 
at the Browse At Revision feature of thg and see that the .hgtags file 
has on the default head

708a4fcb73820484a3af94dd4d18453c4d9b29c9 release-4-2-0
1327ea4f5a931a6cc2a6d4790af58cf16de4702b release-4-2-1
<<<<<<< working copy
94f8e2b5a88b79974084c0ae541cacbcc62d64f6 release-4-2-2
=======
a5ad9c053e41ed39a8c69ff99936cbcf18256abf rc-4-3-90
>>>>>>> merge rev

so I now see where the '>>>>>>>' is coming from in the warning message. 
(Originally I thought it was simply an attention grabber.)  Has there 
been an incomplete merge somewhere recently?  Here's a discussion on 
this warning:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16280881/how-do-i-get-rid-of-is-not-well-formed-error-about-my-hgtags-file

Dan