contrib/plan9/README

batching: migrate basic noop batching into peer.peer

"Real" batching only makes sense for wirepeers, but it greatly
simplifies the clients of peer instances if they can be ignorant to
actual batching capabilities of that peer. By moving the
not-really-batched batching code into peer.peer, all peer instances
now work with the batching API, thus simplifying users.

This leaves a couple of name forwards in wirepeer.py. Originally I had
planned to clean those up, but it kind of unclarifies other bits of
code that want to use batching, so I think it makes sense for the
names to stay exposed by wireproto. Specifically, almost nothing is
currently aware of peer (see largefiles.proto for an example), so
making them be aware of the peer module *and* the wireproto module
seems like some abstraction leakage. I *think* the right long-term fix
would actually be to make wireproto an implementation detail that
clients wouldn't need to know about, but I don't really know what that
would entail at the moment.

As far as I'm aware, no clients of batching in third-party extensions
will need updating, which is nice icing.

Mercurial for Plan 9 from Bell Labs
===================================

This directory contains support for Mercurial on Plan 9 from Bell Labs
platforms. It is assumed that the version of Python running on these
systems supports the ANSI/POSIX Environment (APE). At the time of this
writing, the bichued/python port is the most commonly installed version
of Python on these platforms. If a native port of Python is ever made,
some minor modification will need to be made to support some of the more
esoteric requirements of the platform rather than those currently made
(cf. posix.py).

By default, installations will have the factotum extension enabled; this
extension permits factotum(4) to act as an authentication agent for
HTTP repositories. Additionally, an extdiff command named 9diff is
enabled which generates diff(1) compatible output suitable for use with
the plumber(4).

Commit messages are plumbed using E if no editor is defined; users must
update the plumbed file to continue, otherwise the hg process must be
interrupted.

Some work remains with regard to documentation. Section 5 manual page
references for hgignore and hgrc need to be re-numbered to section 6 (file
formats) and a new man page writer should be written to support the
Plan 9 man macro set. Until these issues can be resolved, manual pages
are elided from the installation.

Basic install:

  % mk install      # do a system-wide install
  % hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
  % hg              # see help

A proto(2) file is included in this directory as an example of how a
binary distribution could be packaged, ostensibly with contrib(1).

See http://mercurial.selenic.com/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.