mercurial/help/diffs.txt
author Anton Shestakov <av6@dwimlabs.net>
Sun, 19 Nov 2017 14:02:50 +0800
changeset 35094 38fe3fe4bbb6
parent 12083 ebfc46929f3e
permissions -rw-r--r--
hgweb: show instabilities of a commit In paper, coal, gitweb and monoblue a new "tag" (or multiple, if there are many instabilities) is added to the same line that has phase, branch, etc of a changeset; in gitweb and monoblue this element has a light red background, in paper and coal the element is black and underlined. In spartan theme instabilities are shown on a separate line. While test-obsolete.t uses first(phasedivergent()) revset to pick a changeset to test, that particular changeset is also an orphan, so two different instability tags are displayed.

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.