view mercurial/help/filesets.txt @ 27142:060f83d219b9

extensions: refuse to load extensions if minimum hg version not met

As the author of several 3rd party extensions, I frequently see bug
reports from users attempting to run my extension with an old version
of Mercurial that I no longer support in my extension. Oftentimes, the
extension will import just fine. But as soon as we run extsetup(),
reposetup(), or get into the guts of a wrapped function, we encounter
an exception and abort. Today, Mercurial will print a message about
extensions that don't have a "testedwith" declaring explicit
compatibility with the current version.

The existing mechanism is a good start. But it isn't as robust as I
would like. Specifically, Mercurial assumes compatibility by default.
This means extension authors must perform compatibility checking in
their extsetup() or we wait and see if we encounter an abort at
runtime. And, compatibility checking can involve a lot of code and
lots of error checking. It's a lot of effort for extension authors.

Oftentimes, extension authors know which versions of Mercurial there
extension works on and more importantly where it is broken.

This patch introduces a magic "minimumhgversion" attribute in
extensions. When found, the extension loading mechanism will compare
the declared version against the current Mercurial version. If the
extension explicitly states we require a newer Mercurial version, a
warning is printed and the extension isn't loaded beyond importing
the Python module. This causes a graceful failure while alerting
the user of the compatibility issue.

I would be receptive to the idea of making the failure more fatal.
However, care would need to be taken to not criple every hg command.
e.g. the user may use `hg config` to fix the hgrc and if we aborted
trying to run that, the user would effectively be locked out of `hg`!

A potential future improvement to this functionality would be to catch
ImportError for the extension/module and parse the source code for
"minimumhgversion = 'XXX'" and do similar checking. This way we could
give more information about why the extension failed to load.

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

Like other file patterns, this pattern type is indicated by a prefix,
'set:'. The language supports a number of predicates which are joined
by infix operators. Parenthesis can be used for grouping.

Identifiers such as filenames or patterns must be quoted with single
or double quotes if they contain characters outside of
``[.*{}[]?/\_a-zA-Z0-9\x80-\xff]`` or if they match one of the
predefined predicates. This generally applies to file patterns other
than globs and arguments for 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'...'``.

There is a single prefix operator:

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

These are the supported infix operators:

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

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

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

The following predicates are supported:

.. predicatesmarker

Some sample queries:

- Show status of files that appear to be binary in the working directory::

    hg status -A "set:binary()"

- Forget files that are in .hgignore but are already tracked::

    hg forget "set:hgignore() and not ignored()"

- Find text files that contain a string::

    hg files "set:grep(magic) and not binary()"

- Find C files in a non-standard encoding::

    hg files "set:**.c and not encoding('UTF-8')"

- Revert copies of large binary files::

    hg revert "set:copied() and binary() and size('>1M')"

- Remove files listed in foo.lst that contain the letter a or b::

    hg remove "set: 'listfile:foo.lst' and (**a* or **b*)"

See also :hg:`help patterns`.