annotate mercurial/help/bundlespec.txt @ 31796:69d8fcf20014

help: document bundle specifications

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 76104a4899ad. 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.

Mercurial supports generating standalone "bundle" files that hold repository
data. These "bundles" are typically saved locally and used later or exchanged
between different repositories, possibly on different machines. Example
commands using bundles are :hg:`bundle` and :hg:`unbundle`.

Generation of bundle files is controlled by a "bundle specification"
("bundlespec") string. This string tells the bundle generation process how
to create the bundle.

A "bundlespec" string is composed of the following elements:

type
    A string denoting the bundle format to use.

compression
    Denotes the compression engine to use compressing the raw bundle data.

parameters
    Arbitrary key-value parameters to further control bundle generation.

A "bundlespec" string has the following formats:

<type>
    The literal bundle format string is used.

<compression>-<type>
    The compression engine and format are delimited by a hypthen (``-``).

Optional parameters follow the ``<type>``. Parameters are URI escaped
``key=value`` pairs. Each pair is delimited by a semicolon (``;``). The
first parameter begins after a ``;`` immediately following the ``<type>``
value.

Available Types
===============

The following bundle <type> strings are available:

v1
    Produces a legacy "changegroup" version 1 bundle.

    This format is compatible with nearly all Mercurial clients because it is
    the oldest. However, it has some limitations, which is why it is no longer
    the default for new repositories.

    ``v1`` bundles can be used with modern repositories using the "generaldelta"
    storage format. However, it may take longer to produce the bundle and the
    resulting bundle may be significantly larger than a ``v2`` bundle.

    ``v1`` bundles can only use the ``gzip``, ``bzip2``, and ``none`` compression
    formats.

v2
    Produces a version 2 bundle.

    Version 2 bundles are an extensible format that can store additional
    repository data (such as bookmarks and phases information) and they can
    store data more efficiently, resulting in smaller bundles.

    Version 2 bundles can also use modern compression engines, such as
    ``zstd``, making them faster to compress and often smaller.

Available Compression Engines
=============================

The following bundle <compression> engines can be used:

.. bundlecompressionmarker

Examples
========

``v2``
    Produce a ``v2`` bundle using default options, including compression.

``none-v1``
    Produce a ``v2`` bundle with no compression.

``zstd-v2``
    Produce a ``v2`` bundle with zstandard compression using default
    settings.

``zstd-v1``
    This errors because ``zstd`` is not supported for ``v1`` types.