annotate mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 20689:401f9b661a2d

doc: show short description of each commands in generated documents

Before this patch, short description of each commands is not shown in
generated documents (HTML file and UNIX man page). This omitting may
prevent users from understanding about commands.

This patch show it as the 1st paragraph in the help section of each
commands. This style is chosen because:

  - showing it as the section title in "command - short desc" style
    disallows referencing by "#command" in HTML file: in "en" locale,
    hyphen concatenated title is used as the section ID in HTML file
    for this style

  - showing it as the 1st paragraph in "command - short desc" style
    seems to be redundant: "command" appears also just before as the
    section title

  - showing it just after synopsis like "hg help command" seems not to
    be reasonable in UNIX man page

This patch just writes short description ("d['desc'][0]") before "::",
because it should be already "strip()"-ed in "get_desc()", or empty
string for the command without description.

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.