mercurial/help/bundlespec.txt

worker: rewrite error handling so os._exit covers all cases

Previously the worker error handling is like:

    pid = os.fork()   --+
    if pid == 0:        |
        ....            | problematic
        ....          --+
        try:          --+
            ....        | worker error handling
                      --+

If a signal arrives when Python is executing the "problematic" lines, an
external error handling (dispatch.py) will take over the control flow and
it's no longer guaranteed "os._exit" is called (see 86cd09bc13ba for why it
is necessary).

This patch rewrites the error handling so it covers all possible code paths
for a worker even during fork.

Note: "os.getpid() == parentpid" is used to test if the process is parent or
not intentionally, instead of checking "pid", because "pid = os.fork()" may
be not atomic - it's possible that that a signal hits the worker before the
assignment completes [1].  The newly added test replaces "os.fork" to
exercise that extreme case.

[1]: CPython compiles "pid = os.fork()" to 2 byte codes: "CALL_FUNCTION" and
"STORE_FAST", so it's probably not atomic:

    def f():
        pid = os.fork()

    dis.dis(f)
      2           0 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (os)
                  3 LOAD_ATTR                1 (fork)
                  6 CALL_FUNCTION            0
                  9 STORE_FAST               0 (pid)
                 12 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
                 15 RETURN_VALUE

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.