view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 29500:4b16a5bd9948

sslutil: try to find CA certficates in well-known locations

Many Linux distros and other Nixen have CA certificates in well-defined
locations. Rather than potentially fail to load any CA certificates at
all (which will always result in a certificate verification failure),
we scan for paths to known CA certificate files and load one if seen.
Because a proper Mercurial install will have the path to the CA
certificate file defined at install time, we print a warning that
the install isn't proper and provide a URL with instructions to
correct things.

We only perform path-based fallback on Pythons that don't know
how to call into OpenSSL to load the default verify locations. This
is because we trust that Python/OpenSSL is properly configured
and knows better than Mercurial. So this new code effectively only
runs on Python <2.7.9 (technically Pythons without the modern ssl
module).

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.