Today I attempted to merge some changes into my local directory.  I’ve done this in the past and never encountered an issue, but today instead of merging and asking me to resolve any errors, I got a message stating “abort: path contains illegal component: …” and the merge failed with no options for proceeding or resolving the issue.

A bit of investigating indicated that the issue was because the change set I was merging included a move of several files.  Apparently version 2.4 of TortoiseHG could not handle merging moved files.  Fortunately, I was very behind in my updates so I decided to try an update before resorting to something drastic.

Sure enough, I updated to v2.11 and attempted the merge and it worked, so if you see an error “abort: path contains illegal component”, be sure to check your version of TortoiseHG first.