view mercurial/helptext/dates.txt @ 50662:12f13b13f414 stable

revlog: avoid possible collision between directory and temporary index

Since 6.4, we create a temporary index file to write the split data without
overwriting the inline version too early. However, the store encoding does not
prevent these new `.i.s` file to collide with a directory with the same name.
While the odds for such a collision to happens are fairly low, the collision
would prevent Mercurial from working.

The store encoding have a mitigation solution in place to prevent such
collisions from happening for `.i` and `.d` files, but not for other extensions.
We cannot update this encoding scheme to solve the issue since it would diverge
from older version of Mercurial.

Instead, we create an alternative directory tree dedicated to such files.
The use of the `.i` extension combined with store encoding will prevent
collisions there.

Some commands allow the user to specify a date, e.g.:

- backout, commit, import, tag: Specify the commit date.
- log, revert, update: Select revision(s) by date.

Many date formats are valid. Here are some examples:

- ``Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006`` (local timezone assumed)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 -0600`` (year assumed, time offset provided)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 UTC`` (UTC and GMT are aliases for +0000)
- ``Dec 6`` (midnight)
- ``13:18`` (today assumed)
- ``3:39`` (3:39AM assumed)
- ``3:39pm`` (15:39)
- ``2006-12-06 13:18:29`` (ISO 8601 format)
- ``2006-12-6 13:18``
- ``2006-12-6``
- ``12-6``
- ``12/6``
- ``12/6/6`` (Dec 6 2006)
- ``today`` (midnight)
- ``yesterday`` (midnight)
- ``now`` - right now

Lastly, there is Mercurial's internal format:

- ``1165411109 0`` (Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006 UTC)

This is the internal representation format for dates. The first number
is the number of seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00 UTC). The
second is the offset of the local timezone, in seconds west of UTC
(negative if the timezone is east of UTC).

The log command also accepts date ranges:

- ``<DATE`` - at or before a given date/time
- ``>DATE`` - on or after a given date/time
- ``DATE to DATE`` - a date range, inclusive
- ``-DAYS`` - within a given number of days from today