view mercurial/helptext/diffs.txt @ 45524:6877b0ee5f9d

mergestate: introduce a new ACTION_KEEP_NEW

`ACTION_KEEP` is overloaded and it's hard to figure out how we end up with this
KEEP, what was the state of things.

In a previous patch, we introduced `ACTION_KEEP_ABSENT` which represents files
which are kept absent in the working directory.

There is another special case where we keep the file when it's not present on
both ancestor and remote side. We introduce a dedicated action for that.

The goal is to use these information to make bid merge smarter.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D9002

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.