annotate doc/README @ 12592:f2937d6492c5 stable

url: verify correctness of https server certificates (issue2407)

Pythons SSL module verifies that certificates received for HTTPS are valid
according to the specified cacerts, but it doesn't verify that the certificate
is for the host we connect to.

We now explicitly verify that the commonName in the received certificate
matches the requested hostname and is valid for the time being.

This is a minimal patch where we try to fail to the safe side, but we do still
rely on Python's SSL functionality and do not try to implement the standards
fully and correctly. CRLs and subjectAltName are not handled and proxies
haven't been considered.

This change might break connections to some sites if cacerts is specified and
the certificates (by our definition) isn't correct. The workaround is to
disable cacerts which in most cases isn't much worse than it was before with
cacerts.

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.