mercurial/help/revisions.txt

manifest: skip fastdelta if the change is large

In large repos, the existing manifest fastdelta computation (which performs a
bisect on the raw manifest for every file that is changing), is excessively
slow. This patch makes fastdelta fallback to the normal string delta algorithm
if the number of changes is large.

On a large repo with a commit of 8000 files, this reduces the commit time by 7
seconds (fastdelta goes from 8 seconds to 1).

I tested this change by modifying the function to compare the old and the new
values and running the test suite. The only difference is that the pure
text-diff algorithm sometimes produces smaller (but functionaly identical)
deltatexts than the bisect algorithm.

Mercurial supports several ways to specify individual revisions.

A plain integer is treated as a revision number. Negative integers are
treated as sequential offsets from the tip, with -1 denoting the tip,
-2 denoting the revision prior to the tip, and so forth.

A 40-digit hexadecimal string is treated as a unique revision
identifier.

A hexadecimal string less than 40 characters long is treated as a
unique revision identifier and is referred to as a short-form
identifier. A short-form identifier is only valid if it is the prefix
of exactly one full-length identifier.

Any other string is treated as a bookmark, tag, or branch name. A
bookmark is a movable pointer to a revision. A tag is a permanent name
associated with a revision. A branch name denotes the tipmost open branch head
of that branch - or if they are all closed, the tipmost closed head of the
branch. Bookmark, tag, and branch names must not contain the ":" character.

The reserved name "tip" always identifies the most recent revision.

The reserved name "null" indicates the null revision. This is the
revision of an empty repository, and the parent of revision 0.

The reserved name "." indicates the working directory parent. If no
working directory is checked out, it is equivalent to null. If an
uncommitted merge is in progress, "." is the revision of the first
parent.