Thanks again to pbreit, Chris, Richard, and any others I'm missing for answering my questions about web2py and mercurial. I'm rapidly getting used to mercurial with web2py and its working great for switching between computers.
I do have a follow-up question about Fabric. Pbreit -- you're absolutely correct that Fabric is very straight-forward and easy to use. I just wanted to dig a little deeper on how you use it with Mercurial, web2py, and a central repo (like Bitbucket). Are you pulling from Bitbucket into a repo on the production server that is in a separate directory than the web directory, then using Fabric to deploy the necessary components to the web directory, minus the hg files and other unneeded stuff (e.g., /home/me/myrepo to /home/www- data/web2py/myapp)? I posted this same question to the list a few days ago, but it doesn't look like it went through (but apologies if it did). Thanks again for your input. Eric