README.rst

bisect: avoid copying ancestor list for non-merge commits

During a bisection, hg needs to compute a list of all ancestors for every
candidate commit. This is accomplished via a bottom-up traversal of the set of
candidates, during which each revision's ancestor list is populated using the
ancestor list of its parent(s). Previously, this involved copying the entire
list, which could be very long in if the bisection range was large.

To help improve this, we can observe that each candidate commit is visited
exactly once, at which point its ancestor list is copied into its children's
lists and then dropped. In the case of non-merge commits, a commit's ancestor
list consists exactly of its parent's list plus itself. This means that we can
trivially reuse the parent's existing list for one of its non-merge children,
which avoids copying entirely if that commit is the parent's only child. This
makes bisections over linear ranges of commits much faster.

During some informal testing in the large publicly-available `mozilla-central`
repository, this noticeably sped up bisections over large ranges of history:

Setup:
  $ cd mozilla-central
  $ hg bisect --reset
  $ hg bisect --good 0
  $ hg log -r tip -T '{rev}\n'
  628417

Test:
  $ time hg bisect --bad tip --noupdate

Before:
  real    3m35.927s
  user    3m35.553s
  sys     0m0.319s

After:
  real    1m41.142s
  user    1m40.810s
  sys     0m0.285s

Mercurial
=========

Mercurial is a fast, easy to use, distributed revision control tool
for software developers.

Basic install::

 $ make            # see install targets
 $ make install    # do a system-wide install
 $ hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
 $ hg              # see help

Running without installing::

 $ make local      # build for inplace usage
 $ ./hg --version  # should show the latest version

See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.

Notes for packagers
===================

Mercurial ships a copy of the python-zstandard sources. This is used to
provide support for zstd compression and decompression functionality. The
module is not intended to be replaced by the plain python-zstandard nor
is it intended to use a system zstd library. Patches can result in hard
to diagnose errors and are explicitly discouraged as unsupported
configuration.