http server: support persistent connections. only "hg serve" affected yet. http server running cgi script will not use persistent connections. support for fastcgi will help that. clients that support keepalive can use one tcp connection for all commands during clone and pull. this makes latency of binary search during pull much lower over wan. if server does not know content-length, it will force connection to close at end. right fix is to use chunked transfer-encoding but this is easier and does not hurt performance. only command that is affected is "changegroup" which is always last command during a pull.

Mercurial's documentation is currently kept in ASCIIDOC format, which
is a simple plain text format that's easy to read and edit. It's also
convertible to a variety of other formats including standard UNIX man
page format and HTML.

To do this, you'll need to install ASCIIDOC:

 http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

To generate the man page:

 asciidoc -d manpage -b docbook hg.1.txt
 xmlto man hg.1.xml

To display:

 groff -mandoc -Tascii hg.1 | more

To create the html page (without stylesheets):

 asciidoc -b html hg.1.txt