mercurial/helptext/diffs.txt

copies: choose target directory based on longest match

If one side of a merge renames `dir1/` to `dir2/` and the subdirectory
`dir1/subdir1/` to `dir2/subdir2/`, and the other side of the merge
adds a file in `dir1/subdir1/`, we should clearly move that into
`dir2/subdir2/`. We already detect the directories correctly before
this patch, but we iterate over them in arbitrary order. That results
in the new file sometimes ending up in `dir2/subdir1/` instead. This
patch fixes it by iterating over the source directories by visiting
subdirectories first. That's achieved by simply iterating over them in
reverse lexicographical order.

Without the fix, the test case still passes on Python 2 but fails on
Python 3. It depends on the iteration order of the dict. I did not
look into how it's built up and why it behaved differently before the
fix. I could probably have gotten it to fail on Python 2 as well by
choosing different directory names.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D10115

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.