annotate doc/README @ 45022:e3b19004087a stable

convert: correctly convert paths to UTF-8 for Subversion

The previous code using encoding.tolocal() only worked by chance in these
situations:

* The string is ASCII: The fast path was triggered and the string was returned
  unmodified.
* The local encoding is UTF-8: The source and target encoding is the same.
* The string is not valid UTF-8 and the native encoding is ISO-8859-1: If the
  string doesn’t decode using UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 is tried as a fallback. During
  `hg convert`, the local encoding is always UTF-8. The irony is that in this
  case, encoding.tolocal() behaves like what someone would expect the reverse
  function, encoding.fromlocal(), to do.

When the locale encoding is ISO-8859-15, trying to convert a SVN repo `/tmp/a€`
failed before like this:

file:///tmp/a%C2%A4 does not look like a Subversion repository to libsvn version 1.14.0

The correct URL is `file:///tmp/a%E2%82%AC`.

Unlike previously (with the ISO-8859-1 fallback), decoding the path using the
locale encoding can fail. In this case, we have to bail out, as Subversion
won’t be able to do anything useful with the path.

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.