mercurial/helptext/diffs.txt
author Arseniy Alekseyev <aalekseyev@janestreet.com>
Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:10:35 +0100
changeset 51626 865efc020c33
parent 43632 2e017696181f
permissions -rw-r--r--
dirstate: remove the python-side whitelist of allowed matchers This whitelist is too permissive because it allows matchers that contain disallowed ones deep inside, for example through `intersectionmatcher`. It is also too restrictive because it doesn't pass through some of the matchers we support, such as `patternmatcher`. It's also unnecessary because unsupported matchers raise `FallbackError` and we fall back anyway. Making this change makes more of the tests use rust code path, and therefore subtly change behavior. For example, rust status in largefiles repos seems to have strange behavior.

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.