procutil: make stream detection in make_line_buffered more correct and strict In make_line_buffered(), we don’t want to wrap the stream if we know that lines get flushed to the underlying raw stream already. Previously, the heuristic was too optimistic. It assumed that any stream which is not an instance of io.BufferedIOBase doesn’t need wrapping. However, there are buffered streams that aren’t instances of io.BufferedIOBase, like Mercurial’s own winstdout. The new logic is different in two ways: First, only for the check, if unwraps any combination of WriteAllWrapper and winstdout. Second, it skips wrapping the stream only if it is an instance of io.RawIOBase (or already wrapped). If it is an instance of io.BufferedIOBase, it gets wrapped. In any other case, the function raises an exception. This ensures that, if an unknown stream is passed or we add another wrapper in the future, we don’t wrap the stream if it’s already line buffered or not wrap the stream if it’s not line buffered. In fact, this was already helpful during development of this change. Without it, I possibly would have forgot that WriteAllWrapper needs to be ignored for the check, leading to unnecessary wrapping if stdout is unbuffered. The alternative would have been to always wrap unknown streams. However, I don’t think that anyone would benefit from being less strict. We can expect streams from the standard library to be subclassing either io.RawIOBase or io.BufferedIOBase, so running Mercurial in the standard way should not regress by this change. Py2exe might replace sys.stdout and sys.stderr, but that currently breaks Mercurial anyway and also these streams don’t claim to be interactive, so this function is not called for them.

Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of
a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be
used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.

While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
following information:

- executable status and other permission bits
- copy or rename information
- changes in binary files
- creation or deletion of empty files

Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS
which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced
by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this
format.

This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
(e.g. with :hg:`export`), you should be careful about things like file
copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when
applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra
information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and
pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary
format for communicating changes.

To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git
option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]
section of your configuration file. You do not need to set this option
when importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.