view contrib/plan9/README @ 31793:69d8fcf20014

help: document bundle specifications

I softly formalized the concept of a "bundle specification" a while
ago when I was working on clone bundles and stream clone bundles and
wanted a more robust way to define what exactly is in a bundle file.

The concept has existed for a while. Since it is part of the clone
bundles feature and exposed to the user via the "-t" argument to
`hg bundle`, it is something we need to support for the long haul.

After the 4.1 release, I heard a few people comment that they didn't
realize you could generate zstd bundles with `hg bundle`. I'm
partially to blame for not documenting it in bundle's docstring.

Additionally, I added a hacky, experimental feature for controlling
the compression level of bundles in 76104a4899ad. As the commit
message says, I went with a quick and dirty solution out of time
constraints. Furthermore, I wanted to eventually store this
configuration in the "bundlespec" so it could be made more flexible.

Given:

a) bundlespecs are here to stay
b) we don't have great documentation over what they are, despite being
   a user-facing feature
c) the list of available compression engines and their behavior isn't
   exposed
d) we need an extensible place to modify behavior of compression
   engines

I want to move forward with formalizing bundlespecs as a user-facing
feature. This commit does that by introducing a "bundlespec" help
page. Leaning on the just-added compression engine documentation
and API, the topic also conveniently lists available compression
engines and details about them. This makes features like zstd
bundle compression more discoverable. e.g. you can now
`hg help -k zstd` and it lists the "bundlespec" topic.

Mercurial for Plan 9 from Bell Labs
===================================

This directory contains support for Mercurial on Plan 9 from Bell Labs
platforms. It is assumed that the version of Python running on these
systems supports the ANSI/POSIX Environment (APE). At the time of this
writing, the bichued/python port is the most commonly installed version
of Python on these platforms. If a native port of Python is ever made,
some minor modification will need to be made to support some of the more
esoteric requirements of the platform rather than those currently made
(cf. posix.py).

By default, installations will have the factotum extension enabled; this
extension permits factotum(4) to act as an authentication agent for
HTTP repositories. Additionally, an extdiff command named 9diff is
enabled which generates diff(1) compatible output suitable for use with
the plumber(4).

Commit messages are plumbed using E if no editor is defined; users must
update the plumbed file to continue, otherwise the hg process must be
interrupted.

Some work remains with regard to documentation. Section 5 manual page
references for hgignore and hgrc need to be re-numbered to section 6 (file
formats) and a new man page writer should be written to support the
Plan 9 man macro set. Until these issues can be resolved, manual pages
are elided from the installation.

Basic install:

  % mk install      # do a system-wide install
  % hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
  % hg              # see help

A proto(2) file is included in this directory as an example of how a
binary distribution could be packaged, ostensibly with contrib(1).

See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.