Prior to 4.9, it's possible to use symlinks and subrepositories to defeat Mercurial's path-checking logic and write files outside a repository. As per recommendation of Augie Fackler (Mercurial developer), I'm creating a global rc file to disable subrepos or any future dangerous feature. If you need subrepos support, you can enable it in the project rc file (i.e. myrepo/.hg/hgrc). Use it only with really trusty sources.