mercurial/help/diffs.txt

wireproto: add request IDs to frames

One of my primary goals with the new wire protocol is to make
operations faster and enable both client and server-side
operations to scale to multiple CPU cores.

One of the ways we make server interactions faster is by reducing
the number of round trips to that server.

With the existing wire protocol, the "batch" command facilitates
executing multiple commands from a single request payload. The way
it works is the requests for multiple commands are serialized. The
server executes those commands sequentially then serializes all
their results. As an optimization for reducing round trips, this
is very effective. The technical implementation, however, is pretty
bad and suffers from a number of deficiencies. For example, it
creates a new place where authorization to run a command must be
checked. (The lack of this checking in older Mercurial releases
was CVE-2018-1000132.)

The principles behind the "batch" command are sound. However, the
execution is not. Therefore, I want to ditch "batch" in the
new wire protocol and have protocol level support for issuing
multiple requests in a single round trip.

This commit introduces support in the frame-based wire protocol to
facilitate this. We do this by adding a "request ID" to each frame.
If a server sees frames associated with different "request IDs," it
handles them as separate requests. All of this happening possibly
as part of the same message from client to server (the same request
body in the case of HTTP).

We /could/ model the exchange the way pipelined HTTP requests do,
where the server processes requests in order they are issued and
received. But this artifically constrains scalability. A better
model is to allow multi-requests to be executed concurrently and
for responses to be sent and handled concurrently. So the
specification explicitly allows this. There is some work to be done
around specifying dependencies between multi-requests. We take
the easy road for now and punt on this problem, declaring that
if order is important, clients must not issue the request until
responses to dependent requests have been received.

This commit focuses on the boilerplate of implementing the request
ID. The server reactor still can't manage multiple, in-flight
request IDs. This will be addressed in a subsequent commit.

Because the wire semantics have changed, we bump the version of the
media type.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2869

Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of
a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be
used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.

While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
following information:

- executable status and other permission bits
- copy or rename information
- changes in binary files
- creation or deletion of empty files

Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS
which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced
by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this
format.

This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
(e.g. with :hg:`export`), you should be careful about things like file
copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when
applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra
information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and
pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary
format for communicating changes.

To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git
option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]
section of your configuration file. You do not need to set this option
when importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.