view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 40324:6637b079ae45

lfs: autoload the extension when cloning from repo with lfs enabled

This is based on a patch by Gregory Szorc.  I made small adjustments to
clean up the messaging when the server has the extension enabled, but the
client has it disabled (to prevent autoloading).  Additionally, I added
a second server capability to distinguish between the server having the
extension enabled, and the server having LFS commits.  This helps prevent
unnecessary requirement propagation- the client shouldn't add a requirement
that the server doesn't have, just because the server had the extension
loaded.  The TODO I had about advertising a capability when the server can
natively serve up blobs isn't relevant anymore (we've had 2 releases that
support this), so I dropped it.

Currently, we lazily add the "lfs" requirement to a repo when we first
encounter LFS data. Due to a pretxnchangegroup hook that looks for LFS
data, this can happen at the end of clone.

Now that we have more control over how repositories are created, we can
do better.

This commit adds a repo creation option to add the "lfs" requirement.
hg.clone() sets this creation option if the remote peer is advertising
lfs usage (as opposed to just support needed to push).

So, what this change effectively does is have cloned repos
automatically inherit the "lfs" requirement.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D5130

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.