view README.rst @ 50336:cf4d2f31660d stable

chg: populate CHGHG if not set

Normally, chg determines which `hg` executable to use by first consulting the
`$CHGHG` and `$HG` environment variables, and if neither are present defaults
to the `hg` found in the user's `$PATH`. If built with the `HGPATHREL` compiler
flag, chg will instead assume that there exists an `hg` executable in the same
directory as the `chg` binary and attempt to use that.

This can cause problems in situations where there are multiple actively-used
Mercurial installations on the same system. When a `chg` client connects to a
running command server, the server process performs some basic validation to
determine whether a new command server needs to be spawned. These checks include
things like checking certain "sensitive" environment variables and config
sections, as well as checking whether the mtime of the extensions, hg's
`__version__.py` module, and the Python interpreter have changed.

Crucially, the command server doesn't explicitly check whether the executable it
is running from matches the executable that the `chg` client would have
otherwise invoked had there been no existing command server process. Without
`HGPATHREL`, this still gets implicitly checked during the validation step,
because the only way to specify an alternate hg executable (apart from `$PATH`)
is via the `$CHGHG` and `$HG` environment variables, both of which are checked.

With `HGPATHREL`, however, the command server has no way of knowing which hg
executable the client would have run. This means that a client located at
`/version_B/bin/chg` will happily connect to a command server running
`/version_A/bin/hg` instead of `/version_B/bin/hg` as expected. A simple
solution is to have the client set `$CHGHG` itself, which then allows the
command server's environment validation to work as intended.

I have tested this manually using two locally built hg installations and it
seems to work with no ill effects. That said, I'm not sure how to write an
automated test for this since the `chg` available to the tests isn't even built
with the `HGPATHREL` compiler flag to begin with.

Mercurial
=========

Mercurial is a fast, easy to use, distributed revision control tool
for software developers.

Basic install::

 $ make            # see install targets
 $ make install    # do a system-wide install
 $ hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
 $ hg              # see help

Running without installing::

 $ make local      # build for inplace usage
 $ ./hg --version  # should show the latest version

See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.

Notes for packagers
===================

Mercurial ships a copy of the python-zstandard sources. This is used to
provide support for zstd compression and decompression functionality. The
module is not intended to be replaced by the plain python-zstandard nor
is it intended to use a system zstd library. Patches can result in hard
to diagnose errors and are explicitly discouraged as unsupported
configuration.