In Mercurial, is it possible to capture only the contents of a file and not its metadata (e.g. permissions)?

Next problem. If I compare files in a Linux box via CIFS on a Windows box using WinMerge, WinMerge seems to be about file permission. Remarkably, he adds a bit x

sometimes u

, and sometimes in the field u

and g

.

How can I

• return permissions without returning the contents of the file, or
• commit file content without changing permissions?

The odd part is that it hg stat

lists these files as changed, but hg diff

then only gives the difference between the only file that changed the content, from the bunch of files shown in hg stat

. What gives?