view mercurial/help/internals/censor.txt @ 33378:adf95bfb423a

match: make nevermatcher an exact matcher and a prefix matcher

The m.isexact() and m.prefix() methods are used by callers to
determine whether m.files() can be used for fast paths. It seems safe
to let callers to any fast paths it can that rely on the empty
m.files().

The censor system allows retroactively removing content from
files. Actually censoring a node requires using the censor extension,
but the functionality for handling censored nodes is partially in core.

Censored nodes in a filelog have the flag ``REVIDX_ISCENSORED`` set,
and the contents of the censored node are replaced with a censor
tombstone. For historical reasons, the tombstone is packed in the
filelog metadata field ``censored``. This allows censored nodes to be
(mostly) safely transmitted through old formats like changegroup
versions 1 and 2. When using changegroup formats older than 3, the
receiver is required to re-add the ``REVIDX_ISCENSORED`` flag when
storing the revision. This depends on the ``censored`` metadata key
never being used for anything other than censoring revisions, which is
true as of January 2017. Note that the revlog flag is the
authoritative marker of a censored node: the tombstone should only be
consulted when looking for a reason a node was censored or when revlog
flags are unavailable as mentioned above.

The tombstone data is a free-form string. It's expected that users of
censor will want to record the reason for censoring a node in the
tombstone. Censored nodes must be able to fit in the size of the
content being censored.