view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 35438:0ebd94ac56d1

outgoing: respect ":pushurl" paths (issue5365)

Make 'hg outgoing' respect "paths.default:pushurl" in addition to
"paths.default-push".

'hg outgoing' has always meant "what will happen if I run 'hg push'?" and it's
still documented that way:

    Show changesets not found in the specified destination repository or the
    default push location. These are the changesets that would be pushed if a
    push was requested.

If the user uses the now-deprecated "paths.default-push" path, it continues to
work that way. However, as described at
https://bz.mercurial-scm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5365, it doesn't behave the same
with "paths.default:pushurl".

Why does it matter? Similar to the bugzilla reporter, I have a read-only mirror
of a non-Mercurial repository:

  upstream -> imported mirror -> user clone
         ^-----------------------/

Users push directly to upstream, and that content is then imported into the
mirror. However, those repositories are not the same; it's possible that the
mirroring has either broken completely, or an import process is running and not
yet complete. In those cases, 'hg outgoing' will list changesets that have
already been pushed.

Mozilla's desired behavior described in bug 5365 can be accomplished through
other means (e.g. 'hg outgoing default'), preserving the consistency and
meaning of 'hg outgoing'.

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.