mercurial/help/urls.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

Valid URLs are of the form::

  local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  file://local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  http://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  https://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  ssh://[user@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]

Paths in the local filesystem can either point to Mercurial
repositories or to bundle files (as created by :hg:`bundle` or
:hg:`incoming --bundle`). See also :hg:`help paths`.

An optional identifier after # indicates a particular branch, tag, or
changeset to use from the remote repository. See also :hg:`help
revisions`.

Some features, such as pushing to http:// and https:// URLs are only
possible if the feature is explicitly enabled on the remote Mercurial
server.

Note that the security of HTTPS URLs depends on proper configuration of
web.cacerts.

Some notes about using SSH with Mercurial:

- SSH requires an accessible shell account on the destination machine
  and a copy of hg in the remote path or specified with as remotecmd.
- path is relative to the remote user's home directory by default. Use
  an extra slash at the start of a path to specify an absolute path::

    ssh://example.com//tmp/repository

- Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing
  to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/config, e.g.::

    Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
      Compression no
    Host *
      Compression yes

  Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your
  configuration file or with the --ssh command line option.

These URLs can all be stored in your configuration file with path
aliases under the [paths] section like so::

  [paths]
  alias1 = URL1
  alias2 = URL2
  ...

You can then use the alias for any command that uses a URL (for
example :hg:`pull alias1` will be treated as :hg:`pull URL1`).

Two path aliases are special because they are used as defaults when
you do not provide the URL to a command:

default:
  When you create a repository with hg clone, the clone command saves
  the location of the source repository as the new repository's
  'default' path. This is then used when you omit path from push- and
  pull-like commands (including incoming and outgoing).

default-push:
  The push command will look for a path named 'default-push', and
  prefer it over 'default' if both are defined.