annotate README @ 32699:f75d0aa5dc83

revset: lookup descendents for negative arguments to ancestor operator

Negative offsets to the `~` operator now search for descendents. The search is
aborted when a node has more than one child as we do not have a definition for
'nth child'. Optionally we can introduce such a notion and take the nth child
ordered by rev number.

The current revset language does provides a short operator for ancestor lookup
but not for descendents. This gives user a simple revset to move to the previous
changeset, e.g. `hg up '.~1'` but not to the 'next' changeset. With this change
userse can now use `.~-1` as a shortcut to move to the next changeset.
This fits better into allowing users to specify revisions via revsets and
avoiding the need for special `hg next` and `hg prev` operations.

The alternative to negative offsets is adding a new operator. We do not have
many operators in ascii left that do not require bash escaping (',', '_', and
'/' come to mind). If we decide that we should add a more convenient short
operator such as ('/', e.g. './1') we can later add it and allow ascendents
lookup via negative numbers.

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.