view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 35616:706aa203b396

fileset: add a lightweight file filtering language

This patch was inspired by one that Jun Wu authored for the fb-experimental
repo, to avoid using matcher for efficiency[1].  We want a way to specify what
files will be converted to LFS at commit time.  And per discussion, we also want
to specify what files to skip, text diff, or merge in another config option.
The current `lfs.threshold` config option could not satisfy complex needs.  I'm
putting it in a core package because Augie floated the idea of also using it for
narrow and sparse.

Yuya suggested farming out to fileset.parse(), which added support for more
symbols.  The only fileset element not supported here is 'negate'.  (List isn't
supported by filesets either.)  I also changed the 'always' token to the 'all()'
predicate for consistency, and introduced 'none()' to improve readability in a
future tracked file based config.  The extension operator was changed from '.'
to '**', to match how recursive path globs are specified.  Finally, I changed
the path matcher from '/' to 'path:' at Yuya's suggestion, for consistency with
matcher.  Unfortunately, ':' is currently reserved in filesets, so this has to
be quoted to be processed as a string instead of a symbol[2].  We should
probably revisit that, because it's seriously ugly.  But it's only used by an
experimental extension, and I think using a file based config for LFS may drive
some more tweaks, so I'm settling for this for now.

I reserved all of the glob characters in fileset except '.' and '_' for the
extension test because those are likely valid extension characters.

Sample filter settings:

  all()                        # everything
  size(">20MB")                # larger than 20MB
  !**.txt                      # except for .txt files
  **.zip | **.tar.gz | **.7z   # some types of compressed files
  "path:bin"                   # files under "bin" in the project root

[1] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2017-December/109387.html
[2] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2018-January/109729.html

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.