convert: when getting file from Perforce concatenate data at the end As it turned out, even when getting relatively small files, concatenating string data every time when new chunk is received is very inefficient. Maintaining a string list of data chunks and concatenating everything in one go at the end seems much more efficient - in my testing it made getting 40 MB file 7 times faster, whilst converting of a particularly big changelist with some big files went down from 20 hours to 3 hours.

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.

convert: document convert.hg.startrev