"flags" is only supported on certain OS. FreeBSD is one of them.
FreeBSD itself support chflags but not all of its file systems do.

On FreeBSD, copystat() will fail on zfs. The exception is OSError and
errno is EOPNOTSUPP. According to manpage chflags(2), the errno means
"The underlying file system does not support file flags"

If the file system doesn't support flags, we should not call
os.chflags() at first or should not raise exception.

In my patch, I just ignore EOPNOTSUPP exception.

This patch looks like the right thing to do.  I'm +1 but I don't have a BSD box to test it on.

For the record, this seems to break Mercurial on NFS-mounted repositories:
http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-March/030716.html

Barry, I suppose this doesn't warrant being a release blocker for 2.6.5, but in any case you're welcome to advise.

A better approach might be to change the function to:

def copystat(src, dst):
  st = os.stat(src)
  st_dst = os.stat(dst)
  mode = stat.S_IMODE(st.st_mode)
  mode_dst = stat.S_IMODE(st_dst.st_mode)
  if hasattr(os, 'utime'):
    if st.st_atime != st_dst.st_atime or st.st_mtime != st_dst.st_mtime
      os.utime(dst, (st.st_atime, st.st_mtime))
  if hasattr(os, 'chmod'):
    if mode != mode_dst:
      os.chmod(dst, mode)
  if hasattr(os, 'chflags') and hasattr(st, 'st_flags'):
    if st.st_flags != st_dst.st_flags:
      os.chflags(dst, st.st_flags)

This avoids the system calls for the (common) case of not having to change anything at all. Given that the flags are normally not set, it also avoids the problem with NFS.

I committed the simple patch in r79299 (trunk), r79300 (2.6), r79301 (py3k), r79302 (3.1). Tarek suggested a test could be added for this, assigning the issue to him.

Tests added in issue14662. This issue can be closed.

Ok, thanks.