annotate doc/README @ 40589:054d0fcba2c4

commandserver: add experimental option to use separate message channel

This is loosely based on the idea of the TortoiseHg's pipeui extension,
which attaches ui.label to message text so the command-server client can
capture prompt text, for example.

https://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/thg/src/4.7.2/tortoisehg/util/pipeui.py

I was thinking that this functionality could be generalized to templating,
but changed mind as doing template stuff would be unnecessarily complex.
It's merely a status message, a simple serialization option should suffice.

Since this slightly changes the command-server protocol, it's gated by a
config knob. If the config is enabled, and if it's supported by the server,
"message-encoding: <name>" is advertised so the client can stop parsing
'o'/'e' channel data and read encoded messages from the 'm' channel. As we
might add new message encodings in future releases, client can specify a list
of encoding names in preferred order.

This patch includes 'cbor' encoding as example. Perhaps, 'json' should be
supported as well.

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.