snapshot: try intermediate snapshot against parents' base # Regarding The Series Started By This Changeset This is the first changesets of a group adjusting delta chain strategy to build a useful chain of intermediate snapshots. The series will introduce a full strategy to produce chains of multiple snapshots on top of which a "usual" delta chain will be built. That strategy will have multiple steps to maximize snapshot reuse, avoiding pathological cases and improving overall compression in very branchy repositories. An important property of sparse-revlog using such snapshot-chain is that they can use very short delta chain without problematic impact on the resulting compression. Shorter delta chains are important to achieve good performance. To make each step clear, we'll introduce them one by one. See the end of this series for full details. # Regarding This Changeset Before this change, if we cannot store the current revision as a delta against a "simple" candidate (p1, p2, prev), we created a new level-0 snapshot (also called full snapshot). As the first step, we introduce a simple strategy: try an intermediate level-1 snapshot against the chain base of the "current revision" parents. The "current revision" is the one we are currently trying to store in the revlog, triggering this search for a good delta base. The first item in the chain is always a level-0 snapshot. # Effect On The Test Repository We can already see the effect on the test-repository. Most of the snapshots have shifted from level 0 to level 1. The overall size has slightly decreased. (However, keep in mind that this repository only emulates real data) # Regarding Statistic The current series focuses on improving the chain built. Improving the performance of this logic will be done as a second step. Sparse-revlog is still experimental and disabled by default. We'll provide more statistic about resulting size and delta chain at the end of this series.

Our full contribution guidelines are in our wiki, please see:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges

If you just want a checklist to follow, you can go straight to

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges#Submission_checklist

If you can't run the entire testsuite for some reason (it can be
difficult on Windows), please at least run `contrib/check-code.py` on
any files you've modified and run `python contrib/check-commit` on any
commits you've made (for example, `python contrib/check-commit
273ce12ad8f1` will report some style violations on a very old commit).