shelve: add an ability to write key-val data to a new type of shelve files Obsolescense-based shelve only needs metadata stored in .hg/shelved and if feels that this metadata should be stored in a simplekeyvaluefile format for potential extensibility purposes. I want to avoid storing it in an unstructured text file where order of lines determines their semantical meanings (as now happens in .hg/shelvedstate. .hg/rebasestate and I suspect other state files as well). Not included in this series, I have ~30 commits, doubling test-shelve.t in size and testing almost every tested shelve usecase for obs-shelve. Here's the series for the curious now: http://pastebin.com/tGJKx0vM I would like to send it to the mailing list and get accepted as well, but: 1. it's big, so should I send like 6 patches a time or so? 2. instead of having a commit per test case, it more like a commit per some amount of copy-pasted code. I tried to keep it meaningful and named commits somewhat properly, but it is far from this list standards IMO. Any advice on how to get it in without turning it into a 100 commits and spending many days writing descriptions? 3. it makes test-shelve.t run for twice as long (and it is already a slow test). Newest test-shelve.r runs for ~1 minute.

scmutil: add a simple key-value file helper The purpose of the added class is to serve purposes like save files of shelve or state files of shelve, rebase and histedit. Keys of these files can be alphanumeric and start with letters, while values must not contain newlines. In light of Mercurial's reluctancy to use Python's json module, this tries to provide a reasonable alternative for a non-nested named data. Comparing to current approach of storing state in plain text files, where semantic meaning of lines of text is only determined by their oreder, simple key-value file allows for reordering lines and thus helps handle optional values. Initial use-case I see for this is obs-shelve's shelve files. Later we can possibly migrate state files to this approach. The test is in a new file beause I did not figure out where to put it within existing test suite. If you give me a better idea, I will gladly follow it.