view mercurial/help/internals/censor.txt @ 36858:01f6bba64424

hgweb: remove support for POST form data (BC)

Previously, we called out to cgi.parse(), which for POST requests
parsed multipart/form-data and application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Type requests for form data, combined it with query string
parameters, returned a union of the values.

As far as I know, nothing in Mercurial actually uses this mechanism
to submit data to the HTTP server. The wire protocol has its own
mechanism for passing parameters. And the web interface only does
GET requests. Removing support for parsing POST data doesn't break
any tests.

Another reason to not like this feature is that cgi.parse() may
modify the QUERY_STRING environment variable as a side-effect.
In addition, it merges both POST data and the query string into
one data structure. This prevents consumers from knowing whether
a variable came from the query string or POST data. That can matter
for some operations.

I suspect we use cgi.parse() because back when this code was
initially implemented, it was the function that was readily
available. In other words, I don't think there was conscious
choice to support POST data: we just got it because cgi.parse()
supported it.

Since nothing uses the feature and it is untested, let's remove
support for parsing POST form data. We can add it back in easily
enough if we need it in the future.

.. bc::

   Hgweb no longer reads form data in POST requests from
   multipart/form-data and application/x-www-form-urlencoded
   requests. Arguments should be specified as URL path components
   or in the query string in the URL instead.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2774

The censor system allows retroactively removing content from
files. Actually censoring a node requires using the censor extension,
but the functionality for handling censored nodes is partially in core.

Censored nodes in a filelog have the flag ``REVIDX_ISCENSORED`` set,
and the contents of the censored node are replaced with a censor
tombstone. For historical reasons, the tombstone is packed in the
filelog metadata field ``censored``. This allows censored nodes to be
(mostly) safely transmitted through old formats like changegroup
versions 1 and 2. When using changegroup formats older than 3, the
receiver is required to re-add the ``REVIDX_ISCENSORED`` flag when
storing the revision. This depends on the ``censored`` metadata key
never being used for anything other than censoring revisions, which is
true as of January 2017. Note that the revlog flag is the
authoritative marker of a censored node: the tombstone should only be
consulted when looking for a reason a node was censored or when revlog
flags are unavailable as mentioned above.

The tombstone data is a free-form string. It's expected that users of
censor will want to record the reason for censoring a node in the
tombstone. Censored nodes must be able to fit in the size of the
content being censored.