view mercurial/help/urls.txt @ 26644:74de1c59f71c

clonebundles: filter on bundle specification

Not all clients are capable of reading every bundle. Currently, content
negotiation to ensure a server sends a client a compatible bundle
format is performed at request time. The response bundle is dynamically
generated at request time, so this works fine.

Clone bundles are statically generated *before* the request. This means
that a modern server could produce bundles that a legacy client isn't
capable of reading. Without some kind of "type hint" in the clone
bundles manifest, a client may attempt to download an incompatible
bundle. Furthermore, a client may not realize a bundle is incompatible
until it has processed part of the bundle (imagine consuming a 1 GB
changegroup bundle2 part only to discover the bundle2 part afterwards is
incompatibl). This would waste time and resources. And it isn't very
user friendly.

Clone bundle manifests thus need to advertise the *exact* format of the
hosted bundles so clients may filter out entries that they don't know
how to read. This patch introduces that mechanism.

We introduce the BUNDLESPEC attribute to declare the "bundle
specification" of the entry. Bundle specifications are parsed using
exchange.parsebundlespecification, which uses the same strings as the
"--type" argument to `hg bundle`. The supported bundle specifications
are well defined and backwards compatible.

When a client encounters a BUNDLESPEC that is invalid or unsupported, it
silently ignores the entry.

Valid URLs are of the form::

  local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  file://local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  http://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  https://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  ssh://[user@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]

Paths in the local filesystem can either point to Mercurial
repositories or to bundle files (as created by :hg:`bundle` or
:hg:`incoming --bundle`). See also :hg:`help paths`.

An optional identifier after # indicates a particular branch, tag, or
changeset to use from the remote repository. See also :hg:`help
revisions`.

Some features, such as pushing to http:// and https:// URLs are only
possible if the feature is explicitly enabled on the remote Mercurial
server.

Note that the security of HTTPS URLs depends on proper configuration of
web.cacerts.

Some notes about using SSH with Mercurial:

- SSH requires an accessible shell account on the destination machine
  and a copy of hg in the remote path or specified with as remotecmd.
- path is relative to the remote user's home directory by default. Use
  an extra slash at the start of a path to specify an absolute path::

    ssh://example.com//tmp/repository

- Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing
  to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/config, e.g.::

    Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
      Compression no
    Host *
      Compression yes

  Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your
  configuration file or with the --ssh command line option.

These URLs can all be stored in your configuration file with path
aliases under the [paths] section like so::

  [paths]
  alias1 = URL1
  alias2 = URL2
  ...

You can then use the alias for any command that uses a URL (for
example :hg:`pull alias1` will be treated as :hg:`pull URL1`).

Two path aliases are special because they are used as defaults when
you do not provide the URL to a command:

default:
  When you create a repository with hg clone, the clone command saves
  the location of the source repository as the new repository's
  'default' path. This is then used when you omit path from push- and
  pull-like commands (including incoming and outgoing).

default-push:
  The push command will look for a path named 'default-push', and
  prefer it over 'default' if both are defined.