Faulty understanding

[Peter Hosey]

On Oct 01, 2008, at 04:34:12, John Francis Lee wrote:
> run "hg init"
> copy the legislation into the directory,
>  2 files
> run "hg commit", mercurial claims that "nothing has changed"

Because you have not added the files. Use:

	hg add fileA fileB

You must explicitly add the files before Mercurial will track them.  
This is to prevent you from accidentally version-controlling something  
that you shouldn't (such as build products in a software project).

Likewise, if you ever want to remove the files, use hg remove (aka hg  
rm).