view mercurial/help/extensions.txt @ 40626:87a872555e90

revlog: detect incomplete revlog reads

_readsegment() is supposed to return N bytes of revlog revision
data starting at a file offset. Surprisingly, its behavior before
this patch never verified that it actually read and returned N
bytes! Instead, it would perform the read(), then return whatever
data was available. And even more surprisingly, nothing in the
call chain appears to have been validating that it received all
the data it was expecting.

This behavior could lead to partial or incomplete revision chunks
being operated on. This could result in e.g. cached deltas being
applied against incomplete base revisions. The delta application
process would happily perform this operation. Only hash
verification would detect the corruption and save us.

This commit changes the behavior of raw revlog reading to validate
that we actually read() the number of bytes that were requested.
We will raise a more specific error faster, rather than possibly
have it go undetected or manifest later in the call stack, at
delta application or hash verification.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D5266

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 = !