doc/README

revlog: use compression engine API for compression

This commit swaps in the just-added revlog compressor API into
the revlog class.

Instead of implementing zlib compression inline in compress(), we
now store a cached-on-first-use revlog compressor on each revlog
instance and invoke its "compress()" method.

As part of this, revlog.compress() has been refactored a bit to use
a cleaner code flow and modern formatting (e.g. avoiding
parenthesis around returned tuples).

On a mozilla-unified repo, here are the "compress" times for a few
commands:

$ hg perfrevlogchunks -c
! wall 5.772450 comb 5.780000 user 5.780000 sys 0.000000 (best of 3)
! wall 5.795158 comb 5.790000 user 5.790000 sys 0.000000 (best of 3)

$ hg perfrevlogchunks -m
! wall 9.975789 comb 9.970000 user 9.970000 sys 0.000000 (best of 3)
! wall 10.019505 comb 10.010000 user 10.010000 sys 0.000000 (best of 3)

Compression times did seem to slow down just a little. There are
360,210 changelog revisions and 359,342 manifest revisions. For the
changelog, mean time to compress a revision increased from ~16.025us to
~16.088us. That's basically a function call or an attribute lookup. I
suppose this is the price you pay for abstraction. It's so low that
I'm not concerned.

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.