mercurial/help/dates.txt

test: update test-sparse-revlog.t output

This test is skipped unless a large artefact is pre-build. It seems like nobody
ran it in a while. Changeset 3764330f76a6 changed the expected output but
nobody noticed.

This changeset focus on the first and simpler step: putting the expected output
back to what one would get by running this test.

However this test changes highlight a couple of deeper issues:

1) Even if the revision content did not changed, a change in the delta
contained in the bundle affected the delta stored in the final revlog, changing
the test result. Since we are testing the delta computation strategy with
sparse, we should not blindly reuse the delta-base from the bundled delta.

2) A change in the format of the repository used to generate the bundle changed
the delta stored in the bundle. We should get a more stable output to avoid
future instabilities of this test.

3) The test is it not run by CI or developer.

We'll try to address all this issues in the coming changesets.

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