We recently noticed an issue with version 5.8 of Mercurial after it got deployed on keep.imfreedom.org that causes freshly cloned repositories to be in a bad state.
As of right now we believe this is only affecting the main Pidgin repository. Our repository has 20+ years of history and has been converted from CVS to Subversion to Monotone and finally to Mercurial. Almost none of those conversions happened without issue, some more than others. Regardless to say our repository isn’t very pristine and this is not the first time we’ve broken a version control system.
We are still working with the amazing Mercurial team to figure out exactly what’s happening, but for the time being we rolled the version of Mercurial on keep.imfreedom.org back to version 5.7.1. We also recommend rolling back your client version back to 5.7.1 as we have been able to reproduce the issue with the server running 5.7.1 and the client running 5.8.
Most of the discussion around this has been in #mercurial on freenode, but we have opened an issue on Mercurial’s Bugzilla if you’re interested in keeping up to date on what’s going on. We will of course post an update here when we have everything figured out.