mercurial/help/diffs.txt
author Matt Harbison <matt_harbison@yahoo.com>
Tue, 14 Aug 2018 14:00:35 -0400
branchstable
changeset 38769 7e023ce26c7f
parent 12083 ebfc46929f3e
permissions -rw-r--r--
convert: don't drop missing or corrupt tag entries Cleaning up the tags file could be a useful feature in some cases, so maybe there should be a switch for this. However, the default hg -> hg convert tries to maintain identical hashes (thus convert.hg.saverev is off by default, but is on by default for other source types). It looks like _rewritesubstate() has a `continue` in it, and therefore a similar problem. I ran into this conversion divergence when a coworker "merged" two repositories by copy/pasting all of the files from the source repo and massaging the code, and forgetting to revert the .hg* files. That silently emptied the .hgtags file after the conversion. (This isn't the manifest node bug Yuya has been helping with- this occurred well after the bzr -> hg conversion and wasn't a merge commit, which made it extra puzzling. That bug is still an issue.)

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.