view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 23643:2205d00b6d2b stable

demandimport: blacklist distutils.msvc9compiler (issue4475)

This module depends on _winreg, which is windows-only. Recent versions
of setuptools load distutils.msvc9compiler and expect it to
ImportError immediately when on non-Windows platforms, so we need to
let them do that. This breaks in an especially mystifying way, because
setuptools uses vars() on the imported module. We then throw an
exception, which vars doesn't pick up on well. For example:

In [3]: class wat(object):
   ...:     @property
   ...:     def __dict__(self):
   ...:         assert False
   ...:

In [4]: vars(wat())
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-2781ada5ffe6> in <module>()
----> 1 vars(wat())

TypeError: vars() argument must have __dict__ attribute

Which is similar to the problem we run into.

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.