view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 32005:2406dbba49bd

serve: add support for Mercurial subrepositories

I've been using `hg serve --web-conf ...` with a simple '/=projects/**' [paths]
configuration for awhile without issue.  Let's ditch the need for the manual
configuration in this case, and limit the repos served to the actual subrepos.

This doesn't attempt to handle the case where a new subrepo appears while the
server is running.  That could probably be handled with a hook if somebody wants
it.  But it's such a rare case, it probably doesn't matter for the temporary
serves.

The main repo is served at '/', just like a repository without subrepos.  I'm
not sure why the duplicate 'adding ...' lines appear on Linux.  They don't
appear on Windows (see 594dd384803c), so they are optional.

Subrepositories that are configured with '../path' or absolute paths are not
cloneable from the server.  (They aren't cloneable locally either, unless they
also exist at their configured source, perhaps via the share extension.)  They
are still served, so that they can be browsed, or cloned individually.  If we
care about that cloning someday, we can probably just add the extra entries to
the webconf dictionary.  Even if the entries use '../' to escape the root, only
the related subrepositories would end up in the dictionary.

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.