If this feature is enabled, early options are parsed using the global options
table. As the parser stops processing options when non/unknown option is
encountered, it won't mistakenly take an option value as a new early option.
Still "--" can be injected to terminate the parsing (e.g. "hg -R -- log"), I
think it's unlikely to lead to an RCE.
To minimize a risk of this change, new fancyopts.earlygetopt() path is enabled
only when +strictflags is set. Also the strict parser doesn't support '--repo',
a short for '--repository' yet. This limitation will be removed later.
As this feature is backward incompatible, I decided to add a new opt-in
mechanism to HGPLAIN. I'm not pretty sure if this is the right choice, but
I'm thinking of adding +feature/-feature syntax to HGPLAIN. Alternatively,
we could add a new environment variable. Any bikeshedding is welcome.
Note that HGPLAIN=+strictflags doesn't work correctly in chg session since
command arguments are pre-processed in C. This wouldn't be easily fixed.
There are a lot of non-human consumers of Mercurial. And the challenges
and considerations for machines consuming Mercurial is significantly
different from what humans face.
I think there are enough special considerations around how machines
consume Mercurial that a dedicated help topic is warranted. I concede
the audience for this topic is probably small compared to the general
audience. However, lots of normal Mercurial users do things like create
one-off shell scripts for common workflows that I think this is useful
enough to be in the install (as opposed to, say, a wiki page - which
most users will likely never find).
This text is by no means perfect. But you have to start somewhere. I
think I did cover the important parts, though.
