help: scripting help topic
There are a lot of non-human consumers of Mercurial. And the challenges
and considerations for machines consuming Mercurial is significantly
different from what humans face.
I think there are enough special considerations around how machines
consume Mercurial that a dedicated help topic is warranted. I concede
the audience for this topic is probably small compared to the general
audience. However, lots of normal Mercurial users do things like create
one-off shell scripts for common workflows that I think this is useful
enough to be in the install (as opposed to, say, a wiki page - which
most users will likely never find).
This text is by no means perfect. But you have to start somewhere. I
think I did cover the important parts, though.
$ hg init a
$ cd a
$ hg diff inexistent1 inexistent2
inexistent1: * (glob)
inexistent2: * (glob)
$ echo bar > foo
$ hg add foo
$ hg ci -m 'add foo'
$ echo foobar > foo
$ hg ci -m 'change foo'
$ hg --quiet diff -r 0 -r 1
--- a/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
-bar
+foobar
$ hg diff -r 0 -r 1
diff -r a99fb63adac3 -r 9b8568d3af2f foo
--- a/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
-bar
+foobar
$ hg --verbose diff -r 0 -r 1
diff -r a99fb63adac3 -r 9b8568d3af2f foo
--- a/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
-bar
+foobar
$ hg --debug diff -r 0 -r 1
diff -r a99fb63adac3f31816a22f665bc3b7a7655b30f4 -r 9b8568d3af2f1749445eef03aede868a6f39f210 foo
--- a/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/foo Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
-bar
+foobar
$ cd ..