pager: avoid shell=True on subprocess.Popen for better errors (issue5491) man(1) behaves as poorly as Mercurial without this change. This cribs from git's run-command[0], which has a list of characters that imply a string that needs to be run using 'sh -c'. If none of those characters are present in the command string, we can use shell=False mode on subprocess and get significantly better error messages (see the test) when the pager process is invalid. With a complicated pager command (that contains one of the unsafe characters), we behave as we do today (which is no worse than git manages.) I briefly tried tapdancing in a thread to catch early pager exits, but it's just too perilous: you get races between fd duping operations and a bad pager exiting, and it's too hard to differentiate between a slow-bad-pager result and a fast-human-quit-pager-early result. I've observed some weird variation in exit code handling in the "bad experience" case in test-pager.t: on my Mac hg predictably exits nonzero, but on Linux hg always exits zero in that case. For now, we'll work around it with || true. :( 0: https://github.com/git/git/blob/cddbda4bc87b9d2c985b6749b1cf026b15e2d3e7/run-command.c#L201

Mercurial
=========

Mercurial is a fast, easy to use, distributed revision control tool
for software developers.

Basic install:

 $ make            # see install targets
 $ make install    # do a system-wide install
 $ hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
 $ hg              # see help

Running without installing:

 $ make local      # build for inplace usage
 $ ./hg --version  # should show the latest version

See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.