view mercurial/help/hg.1.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.

====
 hg
====

---------------------------------------
Mercurial source code management system
---------------------------------------

:Author:         Matt Mackall <[e-mail]>
:Organization:   Mercurial
:Manual section: 1
:Manual group:   Mercurial Manual

.. contents::
   :backlinks: top
   :class: htmlonly
   :depth: 1


Synopsis
""""""""
**hg** *command* [*option*]... [*argument*]...

Description
"""""""""""
The **hg** command provides a command line interface to the Mercurial
system.

Command Elements
""""""""""""""""

files...
    indicates one or more filename or relative path filenames; see
    `File Name Patterns`_ for information on pattern matching

path
    indicates a path on the local machine

revision
    indicates a changeset which can be specified as a changeset
    revision number, a tag, or a unique substring of the changeset
    hash value

repository path
    either the pathname of a local repository or the URI of a remote
    repository.

.. include:: hg.1.gendoc.txt

Files
"""""

``/etc/mercurial/hgrc``, ``$HOME/.hgrc``, ``.hg/hgrc``
    This file contains defaults and configuration. Values in
    ``.hg/hgrc`` override those in ``$HOME/.hgrc``, and these override
    settings made in the global ``/etc/mercurial/hgrc`` configuration.
    See |hgrc(5)|_ for details of the contents and format of these
    files.

``.hgignore``
    This file contains regular expressions (one per line) that
    describe file names that should be ignored by **hg**. For details,
    see |hgignore(5)|_.

``.hgsub``
    This file defines the locations of all subrepositories, and
    tells where the subrepository checkouts came from. For details, see
    :hg:`help subrepos`.

``.hgsubstate``
    This file is where Mercurial stores all nested repository states. *NB: This
    file should not be edited manually.*

``.hgtags``
    This file contains changeset hash values and text tag names (one
    of each separated by spaces) that correspond to tagged versions of
    the repository contents. The file content is encoded using UTF-8.

``.hg/last-message.txt``
    This file is used by :hg:`commit` to store a backup of the commit message
    in case the commit fails.

``.hg/localtags``
    This file can be used to define local tags which are not shared among
    repositories. The file format is the same as for ``.hgtags``, but it is
    encoded using the local system encoding.

Some commands (e.g. revert) produce backup files ending in ``.orig``,
if the ``.orig`` file already exists and is not tracked by Mercurial,
it will be overwritten.

Bugs
""""
Probably lots, please post them to the mailing list (see Resources_
below) when you find them.

See Also
""""""""
|hgignore(5)|_, |hgrc(5)|_

Author
""""""
Written by Matt Mackall <[e-mail]>

Resources
"""""""""
Main Web Site: https://mercurial-scm.org/

Source code repository: http://selenic.com/hg

Mailing list: http://selenic.com/mailman/listinfo/mercurial

Copying
"""""""
Copyright (C) 2005-2015 Matt Mackall.
Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the GNU General
Public License version 2 or any later version.

.. include:: common.txt