1 Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of

     2 a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be

     3 used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.

     4 

     5 While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the

     6 following information:

     7 

     8 - executable status and other permission bits

     9 - copy or rename information

    10 - changes in binary files

    11 - creation or deletion of empty files

    12 

    13 Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS

    14 which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced

    15 by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this

    16 format.

    17 

    18 This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository

    19 (e.g. with "hg export"), you should be careful about things like file

    20 copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when

    21 applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra

    22 information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and

    23 pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary

    24 format for communicating changes.

    25 

    26 To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git

    27 option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]

    28 section of your hgrc. You do not need to set this option when

    29 importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.