posix: always seek to EOF when opening a file in append mode Python 3 already does this, so skip it there. Consider the program: #include <stdio.h> int main() { FILE *f = fopen("narf", "w"); fprintf(f, "narf\n"); fclose(f); f = fopen("narf", "a"); printf("%ld\n", ftell(f)); fprintf(f, "troz\n"); printf("%ld\n", ftell(f)); return 0; } on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux with glibc, this program prints 5 10 but on musl libc (Alpine Linux and probably others) this prints 0 10 By my reading of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fopen.html this is technically correct, specifically: > Opening a file with append mode (a as the first character in the > mode argument) shall cause all subsequent writes to the file to be > forced to the then current end-of-file, regardless of intervening > calls to fseek(). in other words, the file position doesn't really matter in append-mode files, and we can't depend on it being at all meaningful unless we perform a seek() before tell() after open(..., 'a'). Experimentally after a .write() we can do a .tell() and it'll always be reasonable, but I'm unclear from reading the specification if that's a smart thing to rely on. This matches what we do on Windows and what Python 3 does for free, so let's just be consistent. Thanks to Yuya for the idea.

  $ cat > abortcommit.py <<EOF
  > from mercurial import error
  > def hook(**args):
  >     raise error.Abort(b"no commits allowed")
  > def reposetup(ui, repo):
  >     repo.ui.setconfig(b"hooks", b"pretxncommit.nocommits", hook)
  > EOF
  $ abspath=`pwd`/abortcommit.py

  $ cat <<EOF >> $HGRCPATH
  > [extensions]
  > mq =
  > abortcommit = $abspath
  > EOF

  $ hg init foo
  $ cd foo
  $ echo foo > foo
  $ hg add foo

mq may keep a reference to the repository so __del__ will not be
called and .hg/journal.dirstate will not be deleted:

  $ hg ci -m foo
  error: pretxncommit.nocommits hook failed: no commits allowed
  transaction abort!
  rollback completed
  abort: no commits allowed
  [255]
  $ hg ci -m foo
  error: pretxncommit.nocommits hook failed: no commits allowed
  transaction abort!
  rollback completed
  abort: no commits allowed
  [255]

  $ cd ..