Re: ediff-revision doesn't recognize Mercurial-managed source

[Skip Montanaro]

> > > Do I need to sprinkle some sort of magic ~/.emacs magic pixie dust to
> > > get vc to work?
> >
> > It should Just Work (though I'm not familiar with emacsformacosx.com).
>
> Thanks.  I'll keep messing around with it.

Okay, I figured out what's wrong.  The code to determine which vc backend is
in control often just travels up the directory tree looking for a key file
or directory.  For bzr it looks for a file named ".bzr", for hg, ".hg", etc.
The search is depth- (or rather height-) first.  My directory tree is broken
(obviously my fault), but managed to work for Subversion and CVS, the two
predominant version control systems in my coding past.  They happen to be
searched for earlier in the list of candidate backends.

Mercurial, alas, appears after Bazaar in the list of candidate backends.  Up
my directory tree (higher than my Mercurial repositories) lies a .bzr
directory dating from some long forgotten experiment with it in 2008.  The
search finds that and thinks that my Mercurial repository is actually part
of a Bazaar repo.

So, problem solved.  I need to do some house cleaning and probably a bit of
directory restructuring, but I should be able to get things squared away
without too much trouble.

For the vc maintainers: breadth-first search up the directory tree might be
something to consider.

Skip Montanaro