Empty directories in Mercurial

Mercurial does not support empty directories (Section 5.1.2), but you need empty directories if you have Mercurial running ontop of an SVN checkout and you want to move your Mercurial repository to a different machine and still be able to perform svn operations.

Running the following script from the base of your repository will rebuild the empty directories.

#!/bin/bash

# Rebuilds empty directories which are lost by HG but required by SVN

for d in `find . -type d | grep /.svn$`;
do
        # -p to make $d/tmp parent directory
        `mkdir -p $d/tmp/prop-base`
        `mkdir $d/tmp/props`
        `mkdir $d/tmp/text-base`
done

An example of how I used this script:

I had a local directory named recsys where I was working on the recommender system for DSpace. It was an SVN checkout of the DSpace trunk and I liked to keep the prototype in sync with trunk to help prevent bitrot. If I pulled recsys from my development machine to my laptop, I lost vital svn directories for performing SVN updates.

Running the above script from the base of the recsys directory re-created the empty SVN directories and let me continue with my work on a different machine.

delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ hg init
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ hg pull http://example.org:8000
pulling from http://example.org:8000
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 9 changesets with 820 changes to 809 files
(run 'hg update' to get a working copy)
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ hg update
807 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ svn update
svn: Can't open '.svn/tmp/tempfile.tmp': No such file or directory
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ ./create_empty_directories.sh
delliott@localhost:~/Source/recsys$ svn update
U dspace/config/dspace.cfg
Updated to revision 3005.

Caveat: I may have totally misunderstood Mercurial. If you think I have, please let me know how I should have solved this problem.