rust/README.rst

wireproto: add request IDs to frames

One of my primary goals with the new wire protocol is to make
operations faster and enable both client and server-side
operations to scale to multiple CPU cores.

One of the ways we make server interactions faster is by reducing
the number of round trips to that server.

With the existing wire protocol, the "batch" command facilitates
executing multiple commands from a single request payload. The way
it works is the requests for multiple commands are serialized. The
server executes those commands sequentially then serializes all
their results. As an optimization for reducing round trips, this
is very effective. The technical implementation, however, is pretty
bad and suffers from a number of deficiencies. For example, it
creates a new place where authorization to run a command must be
checked. (The lack of this checking in older Mercurial releases
was CVE-2018-1000132.)

The principles behind the "batch" command are sound. However, the
execution is not. Therefore, I want to ditch "batch" in the
new wire protocol and have protocol level support for issuing
multiple requests in a single round trip.

This commit introduces support in the frame-based wire protocol to
facilitate this. We do this by adding a "request ID" to each frame.
If a server sees frames associated with different "request IDs," it
handles them as separate requests. All of this happening possibly
as part of the same message from client to server (the same request
body in the case of HTTP).

We /could/ model the exchange the way pipelined HTTP requests do,
where the server processes requests in order they are issued and
received. But this artifically constrains scalability. A better
model is to allow multi-requests to be executed concurrently and
for responses to be sent and handled concurrently. So the
specification explicitly allows this. There is some work to be done
around specifying dependencies between multi-requests. We take
the easy road for now and punt on this problem, declaring that
if order is important, clients must not issue the request until
responses to dependent requests have been received.

This commit focuses on the boilerplate of implementing the request
ID. The server reactor still can't manage multiple, in-flight
request IDs. This will be addressed in a subsequent commit.

Because the wire semantics have changed, we bump the version of the
media type.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2869

===================
Mercurial Rust Code
===================

This directory contains various Rust code for the Mercurial project.

The top-level ``Cargo.toml`` file defines a workspace containing
all primary Mercurial crates.

Building
========

To build the Rust components::

   $ cargo build

If you prefer a non-debug / release configuration::

   $ cargo build --release

Features
--------

The following Cargo features are available:

localdev (default)
   Produce files that work with an in-source-tree build.

   In this mode, the build finds and uses a ``python2.7`` binary from
   ``PATH``. The ``hg`` binary assumes it runs from ``rust/target/<target>hg``
   and it finds Mercurial files at ``dirname($0)/../../../``.

Build Mechanism
---------------

The produced ``hg`` binary is *bound* to a CPython installation. The
binary links against and loads a CPython library that is discovered
at build time (by a ``build.rs`` Cargo build script). The Python
standard library defined by this CPython installation is also used.

Finding the appropriate CPython installation to use is done by
the ``python27-sys`` crate's ``build.rs``. Its search order is::

1. ``PYTHON_SYS_EXECUTABLE`` environment variable.
2. ``python`` executable on ``PATH``
3. ``python2`` executable on ``PATH``
4. ``python2.7`` executable on ``PATH``

Additional verification of the found Python will be performed by our
``build.rs`` to ensure it meets Mercurial's requirements.

Details about the build-time configured Python are built into the
produced ``hg`` binary. This means that a built ``hg`` binary is only
suitable for a specific, well-defined role. These roles are controlled
by Cargo features (see above).

Running
=======

The ``hgcli`` crate produces an ``hg`` binary. You can run this binary
via ``cargo run``::

   $ cargo run --manifest-path hgcli/Cargo.toml

Or directly::

   $ target/debug/hg
   $ target/release/hg

You can also run the test harness with this binary::

   $ ./run-tests.py --with-hg ../rust/target/debug/hg

.. note::

   Integration with the test harness is still preliminary. Remember to
   ``cargo build`` after changes because the test harness doesn't yet
   automatically build Rust code.