I had iPhone mobile development code on my Mac OSX and I wanted to commit it to an online repository, Bitbucket (just like Git’s GitHub, except it is for the Mercurial DVCS).

So I created a private BitBucket repository with the name “Test App”. Surprisingly, BitBucket renamed my basename to “test-app”. However my folder structure was:

Current Folder Structure:

"Test App" (notice it has spaces)
  -- File 1
  -- File 2

Now I can just as easily clone the “test-app” repository and change my folder structure to this:

Possible Solution’s Folder Structure:

test-app
  -- .hg/*
  -- "Test App"
    -- File 1
    -- File 2

But that means I have to change my application file/folder paths. (Although I will note that a sane developer would use relative paths, I unfortunately did not have that option.) Surprisingly, this is not documented in the BitBucket documentation or on any online resource.

Possible solutions I looked at:
– “Hard” Symbolic Links – Unfortunately Mac OSX does not support hard linking to directories.
– Use a script to copy/paste code from “Test App” to test-app, each time I need to check it in – Highly inefficient

Solution
I cloned “test-app” to a folder. So I got:

Output of hg clone:

test-app
  -- .hg/*

Now I took the .hg directory and just moved it to my “Test App” folder, like this:

Final Folder structure:

"Test App"
  -- .hg/*
  -- File 1
  -- File 2

Thankfully, there are no problems with hg commands. Apparently, the Mercurial coders are not hardcoding paths. 🙂