pathencode: don't use alloca() for safety/portability

branchmap: display filtername when `updatebranch` fails to do its jobs We have a very handy assert at the ends of `branchmap.updatecache` that check the resulting branchmap is actually valid. I know we do not like assert in mercurial but this one is very handy for debugging. There is really not reason for `branchmap.updatecache` to have this kind of issue but this happened and handful of time during the development of this or introduction of other related feature. I advice to keep it around until we are a bit more confident with the new code.