Using hardlinks when cloning a Mercurial repository under Windows

Question

I am using Mercurial under Windows XP (using the TortoiseHg distribution) and I want to use NTFS hardlinks when cloning a repository. Out of the box Mercurial does not do this. I have read that a win32file python extension needs to be enabled. So far I have been unsuccessful in making this work (adding a win32file entry to the extensions section in mercurial.ini does not seem to work). Is there a simple way to enable it?

Answer 1

I think you'll need to install full Python and use the Mercurial source install. While TortiseHG's py2exe-compiled installation of Mercurial can load mercurial extensions just fine, it's my understanding that it won't let you swap out core python modules.