view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 24588:0bf54479a9eb

json: implement {shortlog} and {changelog} templates

These are the same dispatch function under the hood. The only difference
is the default number of entries to render and the template to use. So
it makes sense to use a shared template.

Format for {changelistentry} is similar to {changeset}. However, there
are differences to argument names and their values preventing us from
(easily) using the same template. (Perhaps there is room to consolidate
the templates as a follow-up.)

We're currently not recording some data in {changelistentry} that exists
in {changeset}. This includes the branch name. This should be added in
a follow-up. For now, something is better than nothing.

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.