view doc/README @ 36958:644a02f6b34f

util: prefer "bytesio" to "stringio"

The io.BytesIO and io.StringIO types enforce the type of
data being operated on. On Python 2, we use cStringIO.StringIO(),
which is lax about mixing types. On Python 3, we actually use
io.BytesIO. Ideally, we'd use io.BytesIO on Python 2. But I believe
its performance is poor compared to cString.StringIO().

Anyway, we canonically define our pycompat type as "stringio."
That name is misleading, especially on Python 3.

This commit renames the canonical symbols to "bytesio."
"stringio" is preserved as an alias for API compatibility. There
are a lot of callers in the repo and I hesitate to take away the
old name. I also don't feel like changing everything at this time.
But at least new callers can use a "proper" name.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2868

Mercurial's documentation is kept in reStructuredText format, which is
a simple plain text format that's easy to read and edit:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

It's also convertible to a variety of other formats including standard
UNIX man page format and HTML. You'll need to install Docutils:

  http://docutils.sourceforge.net/

Use the Makefile in this directory to generate the man and HTML pages.