view contrib/plan9/README @ 25018:93e015a3d1ea

commit: add ui.allowemptycommit config option

This adds a config flag that enables a user to make empty commits.
This is useful in a number of cases.

For instance, automation that creates release branches via
bookmarks may want to make empty commits to that release bookmark so that it
can't be fast-forwarded and so it can record information about the release
bookmark's creation. This is already possible with named branches, so making it
possible for bookmarks makes sense.

Another case we've wanted it is for mirroring repositories into Mercurial. We
have automation that syncs commits into hg by running things from the command
line. The ability to produce empty commits is useful for syncing unusual commits
from other VCS's.

In general, allowing the user to create the DAG as they see fit seems useful,
and when I mentioned this in IRC more than one person piped up and said they
were already hacking around this limitation by using mq, import, and
commit-dummy-change-then-amend-the-content-away style solutions.

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 http://mercurial.selenic.com/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.