hg merge says outstanding uncommitted changes; hg commit says nothing changed -- how to exit the loop?

Question

The problem here is that hg' workflow apparently leads in a circle:

1. hg pull, get another head
2. hg merge, get warned of outstanding uncommitted changes
3. hg commit -m "pre merge commit", get message saying nothing changed

4. go to 2 hg status, see output like the following:

   ! #foo.py#
   ? junk.out
   ? junk2.out
   

Answer 1

If foo.py is in your list of .hg-ignore'd files try specifying it explicity on the command line when you commit.

e.g.

hg commit -m "commit message" ./#foo.py

---

edit: looking more closely at your error: the file has been deleted (! in the status list), but hg hasn't tracked the deletion. You need to tell hg about the deletion using:

hg rm -A ./foo.py

The -A / --after means record the removal after it actually occured