view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 34900:3a3adbcbd3a0

obsfate: rename obsfate into obsolete in changeset_printer Yuja's comment on the original obsfate about how we would translate obsfate and the recent discussions about exposing users to new concepts and names lead have led me to think that 'obsfate' should be treated as internal jargon. End- users should not be aware of obsfate, so we replace 'obsfate' by 'obsolete' in changeset_printer. It will be easier to understand for end-users, easier to translate and closer to the original Evolve obsfate output. I'm aware it's extremely late in the cycle but I think it's an UX improvement for the end-users. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D1189
author Boris Feld <boris.feld@octobus.net>
date Thu, 19 Oct 2017 12:32:42 +0200
parents ebfc46929f3e
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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.