I had it happened a couple of times now that Mercurial on Windows would give me this error:
skipping unreadable pattern file ‘D:\Documents\Programming\YourProject\’: No such file or directory
This message is strange because the path actually exits.
After some searching I found the solution in the Mercurial bug tracker:
Bug 5325 – “skipping unreadable pattern file” by empty ui.ignore
The title already suggests the solution. There’s an empty ignore=
entry in the global mercurial.ini
file.

Removing this entry solves the problem.
The file is located here:
C:\Users\<YourUserName>\mercurial.ini
Note: It seems this “problem” is caused by SourceTree.
Thank you for this post. It saved me some trouble searching for this distracting message in the mercurial output. And I can confirm that the empty entry is added again when using and closing SourceTree. As a side node: I found it useful to inspect from which sources hg reads it’s config: “hg config –debug” prints this information at the start of it’s output.
Thanks. For me the empty ‘ignore’ was actually in .hgrc.
Thank you for the tip Manski. In my case just as in Robin’s case, the erronoeus line of an empty ignore was in the .hgrc file in my user folder (%USERPROFILE% on Windows).
Code Collaborator client gave this error:
SCM system could not be auto-detected, but there was an error: TFS collection UR L is not specified.
For two years I could not use the application until I found this post. Thank you.
Vielen Dank. Dieser Tipp war tatsächlich die Lösung, die nervige Warnmeldung von TortoiseHg endlich weg zu kriegen.