view CONTRIBUTORS @ 29589:486de14eb394

url: add distribution and version to user-agent request header (BC)

As a server operator, I've always wanted to know what Mercurial
version clients are running so I can track version adoption and
make informed decisions about which versions of Mercurial to
support in extensions. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to discern
this today: the best you can do is look for high-level feature usage
(e.g. bundle2) or sniff capabilities from bundle2 commands. And these
things aren't changed frequently enough to tell you anything that
interesting.

Nearly every piece of software talking HTTP sends its version in
the user agent. This includes web browsers, curl, and even Git.

This patch adds the distribution name and version to the user-agent
HTTP request header. We choose "Mercurial" for the distribution
name because that seems appropriate. The version string comes
from __version__.

The value is inside parenthesis for a few reasons:

* The version *may* contain spaces
* Alternate forms like "Mercurial/<version>" imply structure and
  since the user agent should not be used by servers for protocol
  or feature negotiation/detection, we don't want to even give the
  illusion that the value should be parsed. A free form field is
  the most hostile to parsing.

Flagging the patch as BC so it shows up in release notes. This
change should be backwards compatible. But I wouldn't be surprised if
a server somewhere is filtering on the exact old user agent string. So
I want to make noise about this change.

[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]

Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent Seguí Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>