annotate mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 26755:bb0b955d050d

streamclone: support for producing and consuming stream clone bundles

Up to this point, stream clones only existed as a dynamically generated
data format produced and consumed during streaming clones. In order to
support this efficient cloning format with the clone bundles feature, we
need a more formal, on disk representation of the streaming clone data.

This patch introduces a new "bundle" type for streaming clones. Unlike
existing bundles, it does not contain changegroup data. It does,
however, share the same concepts like the 4 byte header which identifies
the type of data that follows and the 2 byte abbreviation for
compression types (of which only "UN" is currently supported).

The new bundle format is essentially the existing stream clone version 1
data format with some headers at the beginning.

Content negotiation at stream clone request time checked for repository
format/requirements compatibility before initiating a stream clone. We
can't do active content negotiation when using clone bundles. So, we put
this set of requirements inside the payload so consumers have a built-in
mechanism for checking compatibility before reading and applying lots of
data. Of course, we will also advertise this requirements set in clone
bundles. But that's for another patch.

We currently don't have a mechanism to produce and consume this new
bundle format. This will be implemented in upcoming patches.

It's worth noting that if a legacy client attempts to `hg unbundle` a
stream clone bundle (with the "HGS1" header), it will abort with:
"unknown bundle version S1," which seems appropriate.

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.