help: scripting help topic
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.
import sys
globalvars = {}
lines = sys.stdin.readlines()
while lines:
l = lines.pop(0)
if l.startswith('SALT'):
print(l[:-1])
elif l.startswith('>>> '):
snippet = l[4:]
while lines and lines[0].startswith('... '):
l = lines.pop(0)
snippet += l[4:]
c = compile(snippet, '<heredoc>', 'single')
try:
exec(c, globalvars)
except Exception as inst:
print(repr(inst))