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.

  $ hg init r1
  $ cd r1
  $ hg ci --config ui.allowemptycommit=true -m c0
  $ hg ci --config ui.allowemptycommit=true -m c1
  $ hg ci --config ui.allowemptycommit=true -m c2
  $ hg co -q 0
  $ hg ci --config ui.allowemptycommit=true -m c3
  created new head
  $ hg co -q 3
  $ hg merge --quiet
  $ hg ci --config ui.allowemptycommit=true -m c4

  $ hg log -G -T'{desc}'
  @    c4
  |\
  | o  c3
  | |
  o |  c2
  | |
  o |  c1
  |/
  o  c0
  

  >>> from mercurial import hg
  >>> from mercurial import ui as uimod
  >>> repo = hg.repository(uimod.ui())
  >>> for anc in repo.changelog.ancestors([4], inclusive=True):
  ...   print(anc)
  4
  3
  2
  1
  0