view mercurial/help/diffs.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.

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.