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
$ touch a
$ hg add a
$ hg ci -m "a"
$ echo 123 > b
$ hg add b
$ hg diff --nodates
diff -r 3903775176ed b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/b
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+123
$ hg diff --nodates -r tip
diff -r 3903775176ed b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/b
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+123
$ echo foo > a
$ hg diff --nodates
diff -r 3903775176ed a
--- a/a
+++ b/a
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+foo
diff -r 3903775176ed b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/b
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+123
$ hg diff -r ""
hg: parse error: empty query
[255]
$ hg diff -r tip -r ""
hg: parse error: empty query
[255]