view mercurial/help/extensions.txt @ 35616:706aa203b396

fileset: add a lightweight file filtering language

This patch was inspired by one that Jun Wu authored for the fb-experimental
repo, to avoid using matcher for efficiency[1].  We want a way to specify what
files will be converted to LFS at commit time.  And per discussion, we also want
to specify what files to skip, text diff, or merge in another config option.
The current `lfs.threshold` config option could not satisfy complex needs.  I'm
putting it in a core package because Augie floated the idea of also using it for
narrow and sparse.

Yuya suggested farming out to fileset.parse(), which added support for more
symbols.  The only fileset element not supported here is 'negate'.  (List isn't
supported by filesets either.)  I also changed the 'always' token to the 'all()'
predicate for consistency, and introduced 'none()' to improve readability in a
future tracked file based config.  The extension operator was changed from '.'
to '**', to match how recursive path globs are specified.  Finally, I changed
the path matcher from '/' to 'path:' at Yuya's suggestion, for consistency with
matcher.  Unfortunately, ':' is currently reserved in filesets, so this has to
be quoted to be processed as a string instead of a symbol[2].  We should
probably revisit that, because it's seriously ugly.  But it's only used by an
experimental extension, and I think using a file based config for LFS may drive
some more tweaks, so I'm settling for this for now.

I reserved all of the glob characters in fileset except '.' and '_' for the
extension test because those are likely valid extension characters.

Sample filter settings:

  all()                        # everything
  size(">20MB")                # larger than 20MB
  !**.txt                      # except for .txt files
  **.zip | **.tar.gz | **.7z   # some types of compressed files
  "path:bin"                   # files under "bin" in the project root

[1] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2017-December/109387.html
[2] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2018-January/109729.html

Mercurial has the ability to add new features through the use of
extensions. Extensions may add new commands, add options to
existing commands, change the default behavior of commands, or
implement hooks.

To enable the "foo" extension, either shipped with Mercurial or in the
Python search path, create an entry for it in your configuration file,
like this::

  [extensions]
  foo =

You may also specify the full path to an extension::

  [extensions]
  myfeature = ~/.hgext/myfeature.py

See :hg:`help config` for more information on configuration files.

Extensions are not loaded by default for a variety of reasons:
they can increase startup overhead; they may be meant for advanced
usage only; they may provide potentially dangerous abilities (such
as letting you destroy or modify history); they might not be ready
for prime time; or they may alter some usual behaviors of stock
Mercurial. It is thus up to the user to activate extensions as
needed.

To explicitly disable an extension enabled in a configuration file of
broader scope, prepend its path with !::

  [extensions]
  # disabling extension bar residing in /path/to/extension/bar.py
  bar = !/path/to/extension/bar.py
  # ditto, but no path was supplied for extension baz
  baz = !