view mercurial/helptext/diffs.txt @ 49803:55d45d0de4e7

typing: add type hints to pycompat.bytestr

The problem with leaving pytype to its own devices here was that for functions
that returned a bytestr, pytype inferred `Union[bytes, int]`.  It now accepts
that it can be treated as plain bytes.

I wasn't able to figure out the arg type for `__getitem__`- `SupportsIndex`
(which PyCharm indicated is how the superclass function is typed) got flagged:

    File "/mnt/c/Users/Matt/hg/mercurial/pycompat.py", line 236, in __getitem__:
        unsupported operand type(s) for item retrieval: bytestr and SupportsIndex [unsupported-operands]
      Function __getitem__ on bytestr expects int

But some caller got flagged when I marked it as `int`.

There's some minor spillover problems elsewhere- pytype doesn't seem to
recognize that `bytes.startswith()` can optionally take a 3rd and 4th arg, so
those few places have the warning disabled.  It also flags where the tar API is
being abused, but that would be a tricky refactor (and would require typing
extensions until py3.7 is dropped), so disable those too.

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.