mercurial/help/revsets.txt

protocol: send application/mercurial-0.2 responses to capable clients

With this commit, the HTTP transport now parses the X-HgProto-<N>
header to determine what media type and compression engine to use for
responses. So far, we only compress responses that are already being
compressed with zlib today (stream response types to specific
commands). We can expand things to cover additional response types
later.

The practical side-effect of this commit is that non-zlib compression
engines will be used if both ends support them. This means if both
ends have zstd support, zstd - not zlib - will be used to compress
data!

When cloning the mozilla-unified repository between a local HTTP
server and client, the benefits of non-zlib compression are quite
noticeable:

  engine     server CPU (s)   client CPU (s)    bundle size
zlib (l=6)      174.1            283.2         1,148,547,026
zstd (l=1)       99.2            267.3         1,127,513,841
zstd (l=3)      103.1            266.9         1,018,861,363
zstd (l=7)      128.3            269.7           919,190,278
zstd (l=10)     162.0               -            894,547,179
none             95.3            277.2         4,097,566,064

The default zstd compression level is 3. So if you deploy zstd
capable Mercurial to your clients and servers and CPU time on
your server is dominated by "getbundle" requests (clients cloning
and pulling) - and my experience at Mozilla tells me this is often
the case - this commit could drastically reduce your server-side
CPU usage *and* save on bandwidth costs!

Another benefit of this change is that server operators can install
*any* compression engine. While it isn't enabled by default, the
"none" compression engine can now be used to disable wire protocol
compression completely. Previously, commands like "getbundle" always
zlib compressed output, adding considerable overhead to generating
responses. If you are on a high speed network and your server is under
high load, it might be advantageous to trade bandwidth for CPU.
Although, zstd at level 1 doesn't use that much CPU, so I'm not
convinced that disabling compression wholesale is worthwhile. And, my
data seems to indicate a slow down on the client without compression.
I suspect this is due to a lack of buffering resulting in an increase
in socket read() calls and/or the fact we're transferring an extra 3 GB
of data (parsing HTTP chunked transfer and processing extra TCP packets
can add up). This is definitely worth investigating and optimizing. But
since the "none" compressor isn't enabled by default, I'm inclined to
punt on this issue.

This commit introduces tons of tests. Some of these should arguably
have been implemented on previous commits. But it was difficult to
test without the server functionality in place.

Mercurial supports a functional language for selecting a set of
revisions.

The language supports a number of predicates which are joined by infix
operators. Parenthesis can be used for grouping.

Identifiers such as branch names may need quoting with single or
double quotes if they contain characters like ``-`` or if they match
one of the predefined predicates.

Special characters can be used in quoted identifiers by escaping them,
e.g., ``\n`` is interpreted as a newline. To prevent them from being
interpreted, strings can be prefixed with ``r``, e.g. ``r'...'``.

Operators
=========

There is a single prefix operator:

``not x``
  Changesets not in x. Short form is ``! x``.

These are the supported infix operators:

``x::y``
  A DAG range, meaning all changesets that are descendants of x and
  ancestors of y, including x and y themselves. If the first endpoint
  is left out, this is equivalent to ``ancestors(y)``, if the second
  is left out it is equivalent to ``descendants(x)``.

  An alternative syntax is ``x..y``.

``x:y``
  All changesets with revision numbers between x and y, both
  inclusive. Either endpoint can be left out, they default to 0 and
  tip.

``x and y``
  The intersection of changesets in x and y. Short form is ``x & y``.

``x or y``
  The union of changesets in x and y. There are two alternative short
  forms: ``x | y`` and ``x + y``.

``x - y``
  Changesets in x but not in y.

``x % y``
  Changesets that are ancestors of x but not ancestors of y (i.e. ::x - ::y).
  This is shorthand notation for ``only(x, y)`` (see below). The second
  argument is optional and, if left out, is equivalent to ``only(x)``.

``x^n``
  The nth parent of x, n == 0, 1, or 2.
  For n == 0, x; for n == 1, the first parent of each changeset in x;
  for n == 2, the second parent of changeset in x.

``x~n``
  The nth first ancestor of x; ``x~0`` is x; ``x~3`` is ``x^^^``.

``x ## y``
  Concatenate strings and identifiers into one string.

  All other prefix, infix and postfix operators have lower priority than
  ``##``. For example, ``a1 ## a2~2`` is equivalent to ``(a1 ## a2)~2``.

  For example::

    [revsetalias]
    issue(a1) = grep(r'\bissue[ :]?' ## a1 ## r'\b|\bbug\(' ## a1 ## r'\)')

    ``issue(1234)`` is equivalent to
    ``grep(r'\bissue[ :]?1234\b|\bbug\(1234\)')``
    in this case. This matches against all of "issue 1234", "issue:1234",
    "issue1234" and "bug(1234)".

There is a single postfix operator:

``x^``
  Equivalent to ``x^1``, the first parent of each changeset in x.

Predicates
==========

The following predicates are supported:

.. predicatesmarker

Aliases
=======

New predicates (known as "aliases") can be defined, using any combination of
existing predicates or other aliases. An alias definition looks like::

  <alias> = <definition>

in the ``revsetalias`` section of a Mercurial configuration file. Arguments
of the form `a1`, `a2`, etc. are substituted from the alias into the
definition.

For example,

::

  [revsetalias]
  h = heads()
  d(s) = sort(s, date)
  rs(s, k) = reverse(sort(s, k))

defines three aliases, ``h``, ``d``, and ``rs``. ``rs(0:tip, author)`` is
exactly equivalent to ``reverse(sort(0:tip, author))``.

Equivalents
===========

Command line equivalents for :hg:`log`::

  -f    ->  ::.
  -d x  ->  date(x)
  -k x  ->  keyword(x)
  -m    ->  merge()
  -u x  ->  user(x)
  -b x  ->  branch(x)
  -P x  ->  !::x
  -l x  ->  limit(expr, x)

Examples
========

Some sample queries:

- Changesets on the default branch::

    hg log -r "branch(default)"

- Changesets on the default branch since tag 1.5 (excluding merges)::

    hg log -r "branch(default) and 1.5:: and not merge()"

- Open branch heads::

    hg log -r "head() and not closed()"

- Changesets between tags 1.3 and 1.5 mentioning "bug" that affect
  ``hgext/*``::

    hg log -r "1.3::1.5 and keyword(bug) and file('hgext/*')"

- Changesets committed in May 2008, sorted by user::

    hg log -r "sort(date('May 2008'), user)"

- Changesets mentioning "bug" or "issue" that are not in a tagged
  release::

    hg log -r "(keyword(bug) or keyword(issue)) and not ancestors(tag())"