Mercurial repository corruption

Recent versions of Mercurial (since 1.5) support validation of incoming data. Add

[server]
validate = True

to your server's hg config (either .hg/hgrc or the hgwebdir config should work fine) to have the server verify incoming data and refuse invalid pushes. The client will then see an error akin to:

remote: abort: missing file data for beta:dddc47b3ba30e54484720ce0f4f768a0f4b6efb9 - run hg verify

Hope that helps!

Maybe you should avoid pushing to repository altogether. With Mercurial and its distributed nature, everybody can have their branch, and when they feel they are ready, they tell you and you pull from them. No commit-access problems, no push that will break stuff...

This is at least an advice a friend of mine has given me, when I was migrating from SVN to Mercurial.

I don't know, if this is an option to you, but setting up a personal repository for everybody and then pull from the people you need might require less work, than trying to catch dangerous pushes.