view mercurial/help/dates.txt @ 27015:341cb90ffd18

util: disable floating point stat times (issue4836)

Alternate fix for this issue which avoids putting extra function calls
and exception handling in the fast path.

For almost all purposes, integer timestamps are preferable to
Mercurial. It stores integer timestamps in the dirstate and would thus
like to avoid doing any float/int comparisons or conversions. We will
continue to have to deal with 1-second granularity on filesystems for
quite some time, so this won't significantly hinder our capabilities.

This has some impact on our file cache validation code in that it
lowers timestamp resolution. But as we still have to deal with
low-resolution filesystems, we're not relying on this anyway.

An alternate approach is to use stat[ST_MTIME], which is guaranteed to
be an integer. But since this support isn't already in our extension,
we can't depend on it being available without adding a hard Python->C
API dependency that's painful for people like yours truly who have
bisect regularly and people without compilers.

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 of today