doc/README

util: make chunkbuffer non-quadratic on Windows

The old str-based += collector performed very nicely on Linux, but
turns out to be quadratically expensive on Windows, causing
chunkbuffer to dominate in profiles.

This list-based version has been measured to significantly improve
performance with large chunks on Windows, with negligible overall
overhead on Linux (though microbenchmarks show it to be about 50% slower).

This may increase memory overhead where += didn't behave quadratically. If we
want to gather up 1G of data to join, we temporarily have 1G in our
list and 1G in our string.

Mercurial's documentation is kept in reStructuredText format, which is
a simple plain text format that's easy to read and edit:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

It's also convertible to a variety of other formats including standard
UNIX man page format and HTML. You'll need to install Docutils:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/

Use the Makefile in this directory to generate the man and HTML pages.