I softly formalized the concept of a "bundle specification" a while
ago when I was working on clone bundles and stream clone bundles and
wanted a more robust way to define what exactly is in a bundle file.
The concept has existed for a while. Since it is part of the clone
bundles feature and exposed to the user via the "-t" argument to
`hg bundle`, it is something we need to support for the long haul.
After the 4.1 release, I heard a few people comment that they didn't
realize you could generate zstd bundles with `hg bundle`. I'm
partially to blame for not documenting it in bundle's docstring.
Additionally, I added a hacky, experimental feature for controlling
the compression level of bundles in 054e64c4d837. As the commit
message says, I went with a quick and dirty solution out of time
constraints. Furthermore, I wanted to eventually store this
configuration in the "bundlespec" so it could be made more flexible.
Given:
a) bundlespecs are here to stay
b) we don't have great documentation over what they are, despite being
a user-facing feature
c) the list of available compression engines and their behavior isn't
exposed
d) we need an extensible place to modify behavior of compression
engines
I want to move forward with formalizing bundlespecs as a user-facing
feature. This commit does that by introducing a "bundlespec" help
page. Leaning on the just-added compression engine documentation
and API, the topic also conveniently lists available compression
engines and details about them. This makes features like zstd
bundle compression more discoverable. e.g. you can now
`hg help -k zstd` and it lists the "bundlespec" topic.
Previously, we have keywords like "(DEPRECATED)" and "(EXPERIMENTAL)" to
hide command line options in non-verbose help output.
However, sometimes an option is neither deprecated nor experimental. It's
well-tested and working, but just not designed to average users. This patch
adds a keyword "(ADVANCED)" to fit in such use cases.
Thanks rom1dep for the suggestion of the word "advanced".
Selecting single and multiple revisions is closely related, so let's
put it in one place, so users can easily find it. We actually did not
even point to "hg help revsets" from "hg help revisions", but now that
they're on a single page, that won't be necessary.
The ability to negate any boolean flags itself is great, but I think we are not
ready to expose the help side of it yet.
First, while there exist a handful of such flags whose default value can be
changed (eg: git diff, patchwork confirmation), there is only a few of them. The
users who benefit the most from this change are alias users and large
installation that can deploy extension to change behavior (eg: facebook
tweakdefault). So the majority of user who will be affected by a large change
to command help that is not yet relevant to them. (I expect this to become
relevant when ui.progressive start to exists).
Below is an example of the impact of the new help on 'hg help diff':
-r --rev REV [+] revision
-c --change REV change made by revision
-a --[no-]text treat all files as text
-g --[no-]git use git extended diff format
--[no-]nodates omit dates from diff headers
--[no-]noprefix omit a/ and b/ prefixes from filenames
-p --[no-]show-function show which function each change is in
--[no-]reverse produce a diff that undoes the changes
-w --[no-]ignore-all-space ignore white space when comparing lines
-b --[no-]ignore-space-change ignore changes in the amount of white space
-B --[no-]ignore-blank-lines ignore changes whose lines are all blank
-U --unified NUM number of lines of context to show
--[no-]stat output diffstat-style summary of changes
--root DIR produce diffs relative to subdirectory
-I --include PATTERN [+] include names matching the given patterns
-X --exclude PATTERN [+] exclude names matching the given patterns
-S --[no-]subrepos recurse into subrepositories
Another issue with the current state of help, the default value for the
flag is not conveyed to the user. For example in the 'backout' help, there is
no real distinction between "--[no-]backup" (default to True) and "--[no-]keep"
(default) to False:
--[no-]backup no backups
--[no-]keep do not modify working directory during strip
In addition, I've discussed with Augie Fackler and the last batch of the work on
this have burned him out quite some. Therefore he is not intending to perform
any more work on this topic. Quoting him, he would rather see the help part
backed out than spending more time on it.
I do not think we are ready to expose this to users in 4.0 (freeze in a week),
especially because we cannot expect quick improvement on these aspect as this
topic no longer have an owner. We should be able to reintroduce that change in
the future when someone get back on it and the main issues are solves:
* Introduction of ui.progressive makes it relevant for a majority of user,
* Current default value are efficiently conveyed to the user.
(In addition, the excerpt from diff help show that we still have some issue with
some negative option like '--nodates' so further improvement are probably
welcome there.)
That is, help gets tweaked thus:
global options ([+] can be repeated):
-v --[no-]verbose enable additional output
Other proposals have included:
global options ([+] can be repeated, options marked [?] are boolean flags):
-v --verbose[?] enable additional output
and
global options ([+] can be repeated, options marked [^] are boolean flags):
-v --verbose[^] enable additional output
which avoid the unfortunate visual noise in this patch. In this
version's favor, it's consistent with what I'm used to seeing in man
pages and similar documentation venues.
The Mercurial wire protocol is under-documented. This includes a lack
of source docstrings and comments as well as pages on the official
wiki.
This patch adds the beginnings of "internals" documentation on the
wire protocol.
The documentation should have nearly complete coverage on the
lower-level parts of the protocol, such as the different transport
mechanims, how commands and arguments are sent, capabilities, and,
of course, the commands themselves.
As part of writing this documentation, I discovered a number of
deficiencies in the protocol and bugs in the implementation. I've
started sending patches for some of the issues. I hope to send a lot
more.
This patch starts with the scaffolding for a new internals page.
This patch subtly changes the behavior of the parsing of "X.Y" values
to not set the "section" variable when rendering a known sub-topic.
Previously, "section" would be the same as the sub-topic name. This
required the sub-topic RST to have a section named the same as the
sub-topic name.
When I made this change, the descriptions from help.internalstable
started being rendered in command line output. This didn't look correct
to me, as it didn't match the formatting of main help pages. I
corrected this by moving the top section to help.internalstable and
changing the section levels of all the "internals" topics.
The end result is that "internals" topics now match the rendering of
main topics on both the CLI and HTML. And, "internals" topics no longer
require a main section matching the name of the topic.
Not all external extensions provide docs; if you use such an extension, you
will experience a crash if you use "hg help --keyword <word>", and <word>
happens to match the extension name.
It seems like a good idea to document the revlog format.
There is a lot more that could be added to this documentation.
But you have to start somewhere.
If a sub-topic/section is requested and the main topic corresponds to
a topic with sub-topics, we now look for and return content for a
sub-topic if found.
With this patch, `hg help internals.X` now works. hgweb does not yet
render sub-topics, however.
Now that we have multiple directories where help topics can live,
we need a mechanism to access them. We already use "." to
separate topic from section. So it seems logical to also use "." to
denote the sub-directory of a topic.
This patch teaches the help command to parse out the possible
sub-topic and pass it to the help system.
We introduce the "internals" help topic, which renders an index of
available sub-topics. The sub-topics themselves are still not
reachable via the help system.
The help system currently only supports showing help topics from a
single directory. We'll need to teach it to show results from
different directories in order to show the internals topics.
The first step is to teach loaddoc() to load documentation from
a sub-directory.
Before, hg help -c was the same as hg help, now it only shows commands.
Before, hg help -e was the same as hg help, now it only shows extensions.
Before, hg help -k crashed, now it shows all topics.
Since Python 2.5 str has new methods: partition and rpartition. They are more
specialized than the usual split and rsplit, and they sometimes convey the
intent of code better and also are a bit faster (faster than split/rsplit with
maxsplit specified). Let's use them in appropriate places for a small speedup.
Example performance (partition):
$ python -m timeit 'assert "apple|orange|banana".split("|")[0] == "apple"'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.376 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'assert "apple|orange|banana".split("|", 1)[0] == "apple"'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.327 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'assert "apple|orange|banana".partition("|")[0] == "apple"'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.214 usec per loop
Example performance (rpartition):
$ python -m timeit 'assert "apple|orange|banana".rsplit("|")[-1] == "banana"'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.372 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'assert "apple|orange|banana".rsplit("|", 1)[-1] == "banana"'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.332 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'assert "apple|orange|banana".rpartition("|")[-1] == "banana"'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.219 usec per loop
The home of 'Abort' is 'error' not 'util' however, a lot of code seems to be
confused about that and gives all the credit to 'util' instead of the
hardworking 'error'. In a spirit of equity, we break the cycle of injustice and
give back to 'error' the respect it deserves. And screw that 'util' poser.
For great justice.
This allows us to hide {branches} template keyword in a better way. Currently
it is achieved by copying keywords table and deleting 'branches' from it.
This fixes listexts() to exclude translated "(DEPRECATED)" marker correctly.
On the other hand, help_() doesn't need translated keywords, but I don't think
it's worth to separate untranslated keywords just for it.
In some languages that have no caps, "DEPRECATED" and "deprecated" can be
translated to the same byte sequence. So it is too wild to exclude messages
by _("DEPRECATED").
support combining -c and -e
previously -k was misdocumented:
* the first line didn't mention it
* the help half implied you could do help -k keyword topic
with these changes, -k just changes the search method
support -c and -e for -k searches
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.
Python 2.6 introduced the "except type as instance" syntax, replacing
the "except type, instance" syntax that came before. Python 3 dropped
support for the latter syntax. Since we no longer support Python 2.4 or
2.5, we have no need to continue supporting the "except type, instance".
This patch mass rewrites the exception syntax to be Python 2.6+ and
Python 3 compatible.
This patch was produced by running `2to3 -f except -w -n .`.
