mercurial/help/patterns.txt

histedit: pick an appropriate base changeset by default (BC)

Previously, `hg histedit` required a revision argument specifying which
revision to use as the base for the current histedit operation. There
was an undocumented and experimental "histedit.defaultrev" option that
supported defining a single revision to be used if no argument is
passed.

Mercurial knows what changesets can be edited. And in most scenarios,
people want to edit this history of everything on the current head that
is rewritable. Making histedit do this by default and not require
an explicit argument or additional configuration is a major usability
win and will enable more people to use histedit.

This patch changes the behavior of the experimental and undocumented
"histedit.defaultrev" config option to select an appropriate base
revision by default. Comprehensive tests exercising the edge cases
in the new, somewhat complicated default revset have been added.
Surprisingly, no tests broke. I guess we were never testing the
behavior with no ANCESTOR argument (it used to fail with
"abort: histedit requires exactly one ancestor revision"). The new
behavior is much more user friendly.

The functionality for choosing the default base revision has been
moved to destutil.py, where it can easily be modified by extensions.

Mercurial accepts several notations for identifying one or more files
at a time.

By default, Mercurial treats filenames as shell-style extended glob
patterns.

Alternate pattern notations must be specified explicitly.

.. note::

  Patterns specified in ``.hgignore`` are not rooted.
  Please see :hg:`help hgignore` for details.

To use a plain path name without any pattern matching, start it with
``path:``. These path names must completely match starting at the
current repository root.

To use an extended glob, start a name with ``glob:``. Globs are rooted
at the current directory; a glob such as ``*.c`` will only match files
in the current directory ending with ``.c``.

The supported glob syntax extensions are ``**`` to match any string
across path separators and ``{a,b}`` to mean "a or b".

To use a Perl/Python regular expression, start a name with ``re:``.
Regexp pattern matching is anchored at the root of the repository.

To read name patterns from a file, use ``listfile:`` or ``listfile0:``.
The latter expects null delimited patterns while the former expects line
feeds. Each string read from the file is itself treated as a file
pattern.

To read a set of patterns from a file, use ``include:`` or ``subinclude:``.
``include:`` will use all the patterns from the given file and treat them as if
they had been passed in manually.  ``subinclude:`` will only apply the patterns
against files that are under the subinclude file's directory. See :hg:`help
hgignore` for details on the format of these files.

All patterns, except for ``glob:`` specified in command line (not for
``-I`` or ``-X`` options), can match also against directories: files
under matched directories are treated as matched.

Plain examples::

  path:foo/bar   a name bar in a directory named foo in the root
                 of the repository
  path:path:name a file or directory named "path:name"

Glob examples::

  glob:*.c       any name ending in ".c" in the current directory
  *.c            any name ending in ".c" in the current directory
  **.c           any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of the
                 current directory including itself.
  foo/*.c        any name ending in ".c" in the directory foo
  foo/**.c       any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of foo
                 including itself.

Regexp examples::

  re:.*\.c$      any name ending in ".c", anywhere in the repository

File examples::

  listfile:list.txt  read list from list.txt with one file pattern per line
  listfile0:list.txt read list from list.txt with null byte delimiters

See also :hg:`help filesets`.

Include examples::

  include:path/to/mypatternfile    reads patterns to be applied to all paths
  subinclude:path/to/subignorefile reads patterns specifically for paths in the
                                   subdirectory