annotate mercurial/help/dates.txt @ 23643:2205d00b6d2b stable

demandimport: blacklist distutils.msvc9compiler (issue4475)

This module depends on _winreg, which is windows-only. Recent versions
of setuptools load distutils.msvc9compiler and expect it to
ImportError immediately when on non-Windows platforms, so we need to
let them do that. This breaks in an especially mystifying way, because
setuptools uses vars() on the imported module. We then throw an
exception, which vars doesn't pick up on well. For example:

In [3]: class wat(object):
   ...:     @property
   ...:     def __dict__(self):
   ...:         assert False
   ...:

In [4]: vars(wat())
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-2781ada5ffe6> in <module>()
----> 1 vars(wat())

TypeError: vars() argument must have __dict__ attribute

Which is similar to the problem we run into.

Some commands allow the user to specify a date, e.g.:

- backout, commit, import, tag: Specify the commit date.
- log, revert, update: Select revision(s) by date.

Many date formats are valid. Here are some examples:

- ``Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006`` (local timezone assumed)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 -0600`` (year assumed, time offset provided)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 UTC`` (UTC and GMT are aliases for +0000)
- ``Dec 6`` (midnight)
- ``13:18`` (today assumed)
- ``3:39`` (3:39AM assumed)
- ``3:39pm`` (15:39)
- ``2006-12-06 13:18:29`` (ISO 8601 format)
- ``2006-12-6 13:18``
- ``2006-12-6``
- ``12-6``
- ``12/6``
- ``12/6/6`` (Dec 6 2006)
- ``today`` (midnight)
- ``yesterday`` (midnight)
- ``now`` - right now

Lastly, there is Mercurial's internal format:

- ``1165411109 0`` (Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006 UTC)

This is the internal representation format for dates. The first number
is the number of seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00 UTC). The
second is the offset of the local timezone, in seconds west of UTC
(negative if the timezone is east of UTC).

The log command also accepts date ranges:

- ``<DATE`` - at or before a given date/time
- ``>DATE`` - on or after a given date/time
- ``DATE to DATE`` - a date range, inclusive
- ``-DAYS`` - within a given number of days of today