view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 17103:5146de7bce96

convert: keep branch switching merges with ancestors (issue3340)

When running convert with a filemap, merge parents which are ancestors
of other parents are ignored. This is hardly a problem when parents
belong to the same branch, but the result could be confusing when named
branches are involved. With:

  -o-a1-a2-a3...     <- A
    \           \
     b1-b2-b3...-m-  <- B

If all b* revisions are discarded, it is useful to preserve 'm' even if
it is empty after filtering to record the branch switch.

This patch makes filemap preserve "ancestor parents" if there is no
"non-ancestor parent" on the same branch than the merge revision.

Remarks:
- I am not completely convinced by the reasons given above and those
  detailed by Matt in this thread:

http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2012-May/040627.html

  The properties we try to preserve are not clearly defined. That said,
  I know this patch already helped someone on IRC and the tests output
  look reasonable.

- This is a new version of the original "convert: filemap must preserve
  fast-forward merges" patch. It has exactly the same output for 2
  parents merges, the additional complexity is here to handle more than
  two parents.

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.