view mercurial/helptext/bundlespec.txt @ 45095:8e04607023e5

procutil: ensure that procutil.std{out,err}.write() writes all bytes

Python 3 offers different kind of streams and it’s not guaranteed for all of
them that calling write() writes all bytes.

When Python is started in unbuffered mode, sys.std{out,err}.buffer are
instances of io.FileIO, whose write() can write less bytes for
platform-specific reasons (e.g. Linux has a 0x7ffff000 bytes maximum and could
write less if interrupted by a signal; when writing to Windows consoles, it’s
limited to 32767 bytes to avoid the "not enough space" error). This can lead to
silent loss of data, both when using sys.std{out,err}.buffer (which may in fact
not be a buffered stream) and when using the text streams sys.std{out,err}
(I’ve created a CPython bug report for that:
https://bugs.python.org/issue41221).

Python may fix the problem at some point. For now, we implement our own wrapper
for procutil.std{out,err} that calls the raw stream’s write() method until all
bytes have been written. We don’t use sys.std{out,err} for larger writes, so I
think it’s not worth the effort to patch them.

Mercurial supports generating standalone "bundle" files that hold repository
data. These "bundles" are typically saved locally and used later or exchanged
between different repositories, possibly on different machines. Example
commands using bundles are :hg:`bundle` and :hg:`unbundle`.

Generation of bundle files is controlled by a "bundle specification"
("bundlespec") string. This string tells the bundle generation process how
to create the bundle.

A "bundlespec" string is composed of the following elements:

type
    A string denoting the bundle format to use.

compression
    Denotes the compression engine to use compressing the raw bundle data.

parameters
    Arbitrary key-value parameters to further control bundle generation.

A "bundlespec" string has the following formats:

<type>
    The literal bundle format string is used.

<compression>-<type>
    The compression engine and format are delimited by a hyphen (``-``).

Optional parameters follow the ``<type>``. Parameters are URI escaped
``key=value`` pairs. Each pair is delimited by a semicolon (``;``). The
first parameter begins after a ``;`` immediately following the ``<type>``
value.

Available Types
===============

The following bundle <type> strings are available:

v1
    Produces a legacy "changegroup" version 1 bundle.

    This format is compatible with nearly all Mercurial clients because it is
    the oldest. However, it has some limitations, which is why it is no longer
    the default for new repositories.

    ``v1`` bundles can be used with modern repositories using the "generaldelta"
    storage format. However, it may take longer to produce the bundle and the
    resulting bundle may be significantly larger than a ``v2`` bundle.

    ``v1`` bundles can only use the ``gzip``, ``bzip2``, and ``none`` compression
    formats.

v2
    Produces a version 2 bundle.

    Version 2 bundles are an extensible format that can store additional
    repository data (such as bookmarks and phases information) and they can
    store data more efficiently, resulting in smaller bundles.

    Version 2 bundles can also use modern compression engines, such as
    ``zstd``, making them faster to compress and often smaller.

Available Compression Engines
=============================

The following bundle <compression> engines can be used:

.. bundlecompressionmarker

Examples
========

``v2``
    Produce a ``v2`` bundle using default options, including compression.

``none-v1``
    Produce a ``v1`` bundle with no compression.

``zstd-v2``
    Produce a ``v2`` bundle with zstandard compression using default
    settings.

``zstd-v1``
    This errors because ``zstd`` is not supported for ``v1`` types.