protocol: send application/mercurial-0.2 responses to capable clients
With this commit, the HTTP transport now parses the X-HgProto-<N>
header to determine what media type and compression engine to use for
responses. So far, we only compress responses that are already being
compressed with zlib today (stream response types to specific
commands). We can expand things to cover additional response types
later.
The practical side-effect of this commit is that non-zlib compression
engines will be used if both ends support them. This means if both
ends have zstd support, zstd - not zlib - will be used to compress
data!
When cloning the mozilla-unified repository between a local HTTP
server and client, the benefits of non-zlib compression are quite
noticeable:
engine server CPU (s) client CPU (s) bundle size
zlib (l=6) 174.1 283.2 1,148,547,026
zstd (l=1) 99.2 267.3 1,127,513,841
zstd (l=3) 103.1 266.9 1,018,861,363
zstd (l=7) 128.3 269.7 919,190,278
zstd (l=10) 162.0 - 894,547,179
none 95.3 277.2 4,097,566,064
The default zstd compression level is 3. So if you deploy zstd
capable Mercurial to your clients and servers and CPU time on
your server is dominated by "getbundle" requests (clients cloning
and pulling) - and my experience at Mozilla tells me this is often
the case - this commit could drastically reduce your server-side
CPU usage *and* save on bandwidth costs!
Another benefit of this change is that server operators can install
*any* compression engine. While it isn't enabled by default, the
"none" compression engine can now be used to disable wire protocol
compression completely. Previously, commands like "getbundle" always
zlib compressed output, adding considerable overhead to generating
responses. If you are on a high speed network and your server is under
high load, it might be advantageous to trade bandwidth for CPU.
Although, zstd at level 1 doesn't use that much CPU, so I'm not
convinced that disabling compression wholesale is worthwhile. And, my
data seems to indicate a slow down on the client without compression.
I suspect this is due to a lack of buffering resulting in an increase
in socket read() calls and/or the fact we're transferring an extra 3 GB
of data (parsing HTTP chunked transfer and processing extra TCP packets
can add up). This is definitely worth investigating and optimizing. But
since the "none" compressor isn't enabled by default, I'm inclined to
punt on this issue.
This commit introduces tons of tests. Some of these should arguably
have been implemented on previous commits. But it was difficult to
test without the server functionality in place.
To merge files Mercurial uses merge tools.
A merge tool combines two different versions of a file into a merged
file. Merge tools are given the two files and the greatest common
ancestor of the two file versions, so they can determine the changes
made on both branches.
Merge tools are used both for :hg:`resolve`, :hg:`merge`, :hg:`update`,
:hg:`backout` and in several extensions.
Usually, the merge tool tries to automatically reconcile the files by
combining all non-overlapping changes that occurred separately in
the two different evolutions of the same initial base file. Furthermore, some
interactive merge programs make it easier to manually resolve
conflicting merges, either in a graphical way, or by inserting some
conflict markers. Mercurial does not include any interactive merge
programs but relies on external tools for that.
Available merge tools
=====================
External merge tools and their properties are configured in the
merge-tools configuration section - see hgrc(5) - but they can often just
be named by their executable.
A merge tool is generally usable if its executable can be found on the
system and if it can handle the merge. The executable is found if it
is an absolute or relative executable path or the name of an
application in the executable search path. The tool is assumed to be
able to handle the merge if it can handle symlinks if the file is a
symlink, if it can handle binary files if the file is binary, and if a
GUI is available if the tool requires a GUI.
There are some internal merge tools which can be used. The internal
merge tools are:
.. internaltoolsmarker
Internal tools are always available and do not require a GUI but will by default
not handle symlinks or binary files.
Choosing a merge tool
=====================
Mercurial uses these rules when deciding which merge tool to use:
1. If a tool has been specified with the --tool option to merge or resolve, it
is used. If it is the name of a tool in the merge-tools configuration, its
configuration is used. Otherwise the specified tool must be executable by
the shell.
2. If the ``HGMERGE`` environment variable is present, its value is used and
must be executable by the shell.
3. If the filename of the file to be merged matches any of the patterns in the
merge-patterns configuration section, the first usable merge tool
corresponding to a matching pattern is used. Here, binary capabilities of the
merge tool are not considered.
4. If ui.merge is set it will be considered next. If the value is not the name
of a configured tool, the specified value is used and must be executable by
the shell. Otherwise the named tool is used if it is usable.
5. If any usable merge tools are present in the merge-tools configuration
section, the one with the highest priority is used.
6. If a program named ``hgmerge`` can be found on the system, it is used - but
it will by default not be used for symlinks and binary files.
7. If the file to be merged is not binary and is not a symlink, then
internal ``:merge`` is used.
8. The merge of the file fails and must be resolved before commit.
.. note::
After selecting a merge program, Mercurial will by default attempt
to merge the files using a simple merge algorithm first. Only if it doesn't
succeed because of conflicting changes Mercurial will actually execute the
merge program. Whether to use the simple merge algorithm first can be
controlled by the premerge setting of the merge tool. Premerge is enabled by
default unless the file is binary or a symlink.
See the merge-tools and ui sections of hgrc(5) for details on the
configuration of merge tools.