view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 31758:04ec317b8128

hgweb: expose a followlines UI in filerevision view

In filerevision view (/file/<rev>/<fname>) we add some event listeners on
mouse clicks of <span> elements in the <pre class="sourcelines"> block.
Those listeners will capture a range of lines selected between two mouse
clicks and a box inviting to follow the history of selected lines will then
show up. Selected lines (i.e. the block of lines) get a CSS class which make
them highlighted. Selection can be cancelled (and restarted) by either
clicking on the cancel ("x") button in the invite box or clicking on any other
source line. Also clicking twice on the same line will abort the selection and
reset event listeners to restart the process.

As a first step, this action is only advertised by the "cursor: cell" CSS rule
on source lines elements as any other mechanisms would make the code
significantly more complicated. This might be improved later.

All JavaScript code lives in a new "linerangelog.js" file, sourced in
filerevision template (only in "paper" style for now).

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.