view mercurial/help/phases.txt @ 31290:f819aa9dbbf9

sslutil: issue warning when [hostfingerprint] is used

Mercurial 3.9 added the [hostsecurity] section, which is better
than [hostfingerprints] in every way.

One of the ways that [hostsecurity] is better is that it supports
SHA-256 and SHA-512 fingerprints, not just SHA-1 fingerprints.

The world is moving away from SHA-1 because it is borderline
secure. Mercurial should be part of that movement.

This patch adds a warning when a valid SHA-1 fingerprint from
the [hostfingerprints] section is being used. The warning informs
users to switch to [hostsecurity]. It even prints the config
option they should set. It uses the SHA-256 fingerprint because
recommending a SHA-1 fingerprint in 2017 would be ill-advised.

The warning will print itself on every connection to a server until
it is fixed. There is no way to suppress the warning. I admit this
is annoying. But given the security implications of sticking with
SHA-1, I think this is justified. If this patch is accepted,
I'll likely send a follow-up to start warning on SHA-1
certificates in [hostsecurity] as well. Then sometime down
the road, we can drop support for SHA-1 fingerprints.

Credit for this idea comes from timeless in issue 5466.

What are phases?
================

Phases are a system for tracking which changesets have been or should
be shared. This helps prevent common mistakes when modifying history
(for instance, with the mq or rebase extensions).

Each changeset in a repository is in one of the following phases:

 - public : changeset is visible on a public server
 - draft : changeset is not yet published
 - secret : changeset should not be pushed, pulled, or cloned

These phases are ordered (public < draft < secret) and no changeset
can be in a lower phase than its ancestors. For instance, if a
changeset is public, all its ancestors are also public. Lastly,
changeset phases should only be changed towards the public phase.

How are phases managed?
=======================

For the most part, phases should work transparently. By default, a
changeset is created in the draft phase and is moved into the public
phase when it is pushed to another repository.

Once changesets become public, extensions like mq and rebase will
refuse to operate on them to prevent creating duplicate changesets.
Phases can also be manually manipulated with the :hg:`phase` command
if needed. See :hg:`help -v phase` for examples.

To make yours commits secret by default, put this in your
configuration file::

  [phases]
  new-commit = secret

Phases and servers
==================

Normally, all servers are ``publishing`` by default. This means::

 - all draft changesets that are pulled or cloned appear in phase
 public on the client

 - all draft changesets that are pushed appear as public on both
 client and server

 - secret changesets are neither pushed, pulled, or cloned

.. note::

  Pulling a draft changeset from a publishing server does not mark it
  as public on the server side due to the read-only nature of pull.

Sometimes it may be desirable to push and pull changesets in the draft
phase to share unfinished work. This can be done by setting a
repository to disable publishing in its configuration file::

  [phases]
  publish = False

See :hg:`help config` for more information on configuration files.

.. note::

  Servers running older versions of Mercurial are treated as
  publishing.

.. note::

   Changesets in secret phase are not exchanged with the server. This
   applies to their content: file names, file contents, and changeset
   metadata. For technical reasons, the identifier (e.g. d825e4025e39)
   of the secret changeset may be communicated to the server.


Examples
========

 - list changesets in draft or secret phase::

     hg log -r "not public()"

 - change all secret changesets to draft::

     hg phase --draft "secret()"

 - forcibly move the current changeset and descendants from public to draft::

     hg phase --force --draft .

 - show a list of changeset revision and phase::

     hg log --template "{rev} {phase}\n"

 - resynchronize draft changesets relative to a remote repository::

     hg phase -fd "outgoing(URL)"

See :hg:`help phase` for more information on manually manipulating phases.