bisect: avoid copying ancestor list for non-merge commits During a bisection, hg needs to compute a list of all ancestors for every candidate commit. This is accomplished via a bottom-up traversal of the set of candidates, during which each revision's ancestor list is populated using the ancestor list of its parent(s). Previously, this involved copying the entire list, which could be very long in if the bisection range was large. To help improve this, we can observe that each candidate commit is visited exactly once, at which point its ancestor list is copied into its children's lists and then dropped. In the case of non-merge commits, a commit's ancestor list consists exactly of its parent's list plus itself. This means that we can trivially reuse the parent's existing list for one of its non-merge children, which avoids copying entirely if that commit is the parent's only child. This makes bisections over linear ranges of commits much faster. During some informal testing in the large publicly-available `mozilla-central` repository, this noticeably sped up bisections over large ranges of history: Setup: $ cd mozilla-central $ hg bisect --reset $ hg bisect --good 0 $ hg log -r tip -T '{rev}\n' 628417 Test: $ time hg bisect --bad tip --noupdate Before: real 3m35.927s user 3m35.553s sys 0m0.319s After: real 1m41.142s user 1m40.810s sys 0m0.285s

https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/1502

Initialize repository

  $ hg init foo
  $ touch foo/a && hg -R foo commit -A -m "added a"
  adding a

  $ hg clone foo foo1
  updating to branch default
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

  $ echo "bar" > foo1/a && hg -R foo1 commit -m "edit a in foo1"
  $ echo "hi" > foo/a && hg -R foo commit -m "edited a foo"
  $ hg -R foo1 pull
  pulling from $TESTTMP/foo
  searching for changes
  adding changesets
  adding manifests
  adding file changes
  added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
  new changesets 273d008d6e8e
  (run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)

  $ hg -R foo1 book branchy
  $ hg -R foo1 book
   * branchy                   1:e3e522925eff

Pull. Bookmark should not jump to new head.

  $ echo "there" >> foo/a && hg -R foo commit -m "edited a again"
  $ hg -R foo1 pull
  pulling from $TESTTMP/foo
  searching for changes
  adding changesets
  adding manifests
  adding file changes
  added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files
  new changesets 84a798d48b17
  (run 'hg update' to get a working copy)

  $ hg -R foo1 book
   * branchy                   1:e3e522925eff