view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 31990:3e03a4b9ec8c

windows: add win32com.shell to demandimport ignore list

Module 'appdirs' tries to import win32com.shell (and catch ImportError as an
indication of failure) to check whether some further functionality should
be implemented one or another way [1]. Of course, demandimport lets it down, so
if we want appdirs to work we have to add it to demandimport's ignore list.

The reason we want appdirs to work is becuase it is used by setuptools [2] to
determine egg cache location. Only fairly recent versions of setuptools depend
on this so people don't see this often.


[1] https://github.com/ActiveState/appdirs/blob/master/appdirs.py#L560
[2] https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/blob/aae0a928119d2a178882c32bded02270e30d0273/pkg_resources/__init__.py#L1369

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.