Windows people: please help check idea for a new Mercurial repository layout

[Adrian Buehlmann]

I am currently trying to improve the situation described
at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue793
("Can't clone repos that use Windows reserved names in paths",
see also http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx)

The problem is that on Windows, we cannot save a tracked file or directory
with the name, for example, "aux" inside the .hg directory, because it would be
stored as "aux.i" (and possibly "aux.d"), which is forbidden as well
(see issue793).

Such a file "aux" might originate from unix, where it is a perfectly
legal name for a file and the repository might be cloned to Windows
(which today fails).

Now I'm calling the Windows people reading this list for help to check
the following idea:

'''
File and directory names of the type "aux" and "aux.*" (this includes e.g.
"aux.foo.bar") are illegal on Windows, but ".aux" is ok. Also ".aux.foo.bar"
is ok.

So, a simple file/directory encoding strategy (for a new Mercurial repo
layout) would be to prepend a period to every directory- and filename
inside the .hg dir.
'''

If anyone knows this encoding doesn't work, please tell me!

Of course this would be a new, incompatible repository layout, so old
Mercurial versions would not be able to read such new repositories
(see http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/CompatibilityRules).