view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 40777:3c842749debc

match: avoid translating glob to matcher multiple times for large sets

For hgignore with many globs, the resulting regexp might not fit under the 20K
length limit. So the patterns need to be broken up in smaller pieces.

Before this change, the logic was re-starting the full process from scratch
for each smaller pieces, including the translation of globs into regexp.
Effectively doing the work over and over.

If the 20K limit is reached, we are likely in a case where there is many such
glob, so exporting them is especially expensive and we should be careful not
to do that work more than once.

To work around this, we now translate glob to regexp once and for all. Then,
we assemble the resulting individual regexp into valid blocks.

This raises a very significant performance win for large `.hgignore file`:

Before: ! wall 0.153153 comb 0.150000 user 0.150000 sys 0.000000 (median of 66)
After:  ! wall 0.059793 comb 0.060000 user 0.060000 sys 0.000000 (median of 100)

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.