view mercurial/help/bundlespec.txt @ 31956:c13ff31818b0

ui: add special-purpose atexit functionality

In spite of its longstanding use, Python's built-in atexit code is
not suitable for Mercurial's purposes, for several reasons:

* Handlers run after application code has finished.

* Because of this, the code that runs handlers swallows exceptions
  (since there's no possible stacktrace to associate errors with).
  If we're lucky, we'll get something spat out to stderr (if stderr
  still works), which of course isn't any use in a big deployment
  where it's important that exceptions get logged and aggregated.

* Mercurial's current atexit handlers make unfortunate assumptions
  about process state (specifically stdio) that, coupled with the
  above problems, make it impossible to deal with certain categories
  of error (try "hg status > /dev/full" on a Linux box).

* In Python 3, the atexit implementation is completely hidden, so
  we can't hijack the platform's atexit code to run handlers at a
  time of our choosing.

As a result, here's a perfectly cromulent atexit-like implementation
over which we have control.  This lets us decide exactly when the
handlers run (after each request has completed), and control what
the process state is when that occurs (and afterwards).

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 hypthen (``-``).

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 ``v2`` 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.