view hgext/git/TODO.md @ 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.

Octopus Merge Support
=====================

This will be moderately complicated, as we'll need to synthesize phony
changeset entries to explode the octopus into "revisions" that only
have two parents each. For today, we can probably just do something like

    aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaXX{20 bytes of exploded node's hex sha}

where XX is a counter (so we could have as many as 255 parents in a
git commit - more than I think we'd ever see.) That means that we can
install some check in this extension to disallow checking out or
otherwise interacting with the `aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa` revisions.


Interface Creation
====================

We at least need an interface definition for `changelog` in core that
this extension can satisfy, and again for `basicstore`.


Reason About Locking
====================

We should spend some time thinking hard about locking, especially on
.git/index etc. We're probably adequately locking the _git_
repository, but may not have enough locking correctness in places
where hg does locking that git isn't aware of (notably the working
copy, which I believe Git does not lock.)