view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 33698:3748098d072a

releasenotes: add similarity check function to compare incoming notes

It is possible that the incoming note fragments have some similar content as the
existing release notes. In case of a bug fix, we match for issueNNNN in the
existing notes. For other general cases, it makes use of fuzzywuzzy library to get
a similarity score. If the score is above a certain threshold, we ignore the
fragment, otherwise add it. But the score might be misleading for small commit
messages. So, it uses similarity function only if the length of string (in words)
is above a certain value. The patch adds tests related to its usage. But it needs
improvement in the sense of combining incoming notes. We can use interactive mode
for adding notes. Maybe we can do this if similarity is under a certain range.

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.