view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 40042:208303a8172c

obsolete: explicitly track folds inside the markers

We now record information to be able to recognize "fold" event from
obsolescence markers. To do so, we track the following pieces of information:

a) a fold ID. Unique to that fold (per successor),
b) the number of predecessors,
c) the index of the predecessor in that fold.

We will now be able to create an algorithm able to find "predecessorssets".

We now store this data in the generic "metadata" field of the markers.
Updating the format to have a more compact storage for this would be useful.

This way of tracking a fold through multiple markers could be applied to split
too. This would have two advantages:

1) We get a simpler format, since number of successors is limited to [0-1].
2) We can better deal with situations where only some of the split successors
   are pushed to a remote repository.

We should look into the relevance of such a change before updating the on-disk
format.

note: unlike splits, folds do not have to deal with cases where only some of
the markers have been synchronized. As they all share the same successor
changesets, they are all relevant to the same nodes.

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.