Change standard streams mode to binary at hg startup Standard streams are expected to operate in binary mode everywhere, especially with archive, cat, diff and export commands. Rewriting these to separate informational output from binary content is complicated to do and to maintain, nonwithstanding mode switching reliability. Changing all output mode to binary should not have much impact on Windows were stream processing tools are barely used and usually cope with unix style endings. Streams mode being process wide, the switch is performed in the startup script to avoid polluting existing API users who may have solved this issue already or ignored it at least for the mercurial part.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# mercurial - scalable distributed SCM
#
# Copyright 2005-2007 Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
#
# This software may be used and distributed according to the terms
# of the GNU General Public License, incorporated herein by reference.

# enable importing on demand to reduce startup time
from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()

import sys
import mercurial.util
import mercurial.dispatch

for fp in (sys.stdin, sys.stdout, sys.stderr):
    mercurial.util.set_binary(fp)

mercurial.dispatch.run()