view mercurial/help/multirevs.txt @ 24735:07200e3332a1

tags: extract .hgtags filenodes cache to a standalone file

Resolution of .hgtags filenodes values has historically been a
performance pain point for large repositories, where reading individual
manifests can take over 100ms. Multiplied by hundreds or even thousands
of heads and resolving .hgtags filenodes becomes a performance issue.

This patch establishes a standalone cache file holding the .hgtags
filenodes for each changeset. After this patch, the .hgtags filenode
for any particular changeset should only have to be computed once
during the lifetime of the repository.

The introduced hgtagsfnodes1 cache file is modeled after the rev branch
cache: the cache is effectively an array of entries consisting of a
changeset fragment and the filenode for a revision. The file grows in
proportion to the length of the repository (24 bytes per changeset) and
is truncated when the repository is stripped. The file is not written
unless tag info is requested and tags have changed since last time.

This patch partially addresses issue4550. Future patches will split the
"tags" cache file into per-filter files and will refactor the cache
format to not capture the .hgtags fnodes, as these are now stored in
the hgtagsfnodes1 cache. This patch is capable of standing alone. We
should not have to wait on the tags cache filter split and format
refactor for this patch to land.

When Mercurial accepts more than one revision, they may be specified
individually, or provided as a topologically continuous range,
separated by the ":" character.

The syntax of range notation is [BEGIN]:[END], where BEGIN and END are
revision identifiers. Both BEGIN and END are optional. If BEGIN is not
specified, it defaults to revision number 0. If END is not specified,
it defaults to the tip. The range ":" thus means "all revisions".

If BEGIN is greater than END, revisions are treated in reverse order.

A range acts as a closed interval. This means that a range of 3:5
gives 3, 4 and 5. Similarly, a range of 9:6 gives 9, 8, 7, and 6.