view mercurial/help/hg.1.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

====
 hg
====

---------------------------------------
Mercurial source code management system
---------------------------------------

:Author:         Matt Mackall <[e-mail]>
:Organization:   Mercurial
:Manual section: 1
:Manual group:   Mercurial Manual

.. contents::
   :backlinks: top
   :class: htmlonly
   :depth: 1


Synopsis
""""""""
**hg** *command* [*option*]... [*argument*]...

Description
"""""""""""
The **hg** command provides a command line interface to the Mercurial
system.

Command Elements
""""""""""""""""

files...
    indicates one or more filename or relative path filenames; see
    `File Name Patterns`_ for information on pattern matching

path
    indicates a path on the local machine

revision
    indicates a changeset which can be specified as a changeset
    revision number, a tag, or a unique substring of the changeset
    hash value

repository path
    either the pathname of a local repository or the URI of a remote
    repository.

.. include:: hg.1.gendoc.txt

Files
"""""

``/etc/mercurial/hgrc``, ``$HOME/.hgrc``, ``.hg/hgrc``
    This file contains defaults and configuration. Values in
    ``.hg/hgrc`` override those in ``$HOME/.hgrc``, and these override
    settings made in the global ``/etc/mercurial/hgrc`` configuration.
    See |hgrc(5)|_ for details of the contents and format of these
    files.

``.hgignore``
    This file contains regular expressions (one per line) that
    describe file names that should be ignored by **hg**. For details,
    see |hgignore(5)|_.

``.hgsub``
    This file defines the locations of all subrepositories, and
    tells where the subrepository checkouts came from. For details, see
    :hg:`help subrepos`.

``.hgsubstate``
    This file is where Mercurial stores all nested repository states. *NB: This
    file should not be edited manually.*

``.hgtags``
    This file contains changeset hash values and text tag names (one
    of each separated by spaces) that correspond to tagged versions of
    the repository contents. The file content is encoded using UTF-8.

``.hg/last-message.txt``
    This file is used by :hg:`commit` to store a backup of the commit message
    in case the commit fails.

``.hg/localtags``
    This file can be used to define local tags which are not shared among
    repositories. The file format is the same as for ``.hgtags``, but it is
    encoded using the local system encoding.

Some commands (e.g. revert) produce backup files ending in ``.orig``,
if the ``.orig`` file already exists and is not tracked by Mercurial,
it will be overwritten.

Bugs
""""
Probably lots, please post them to the mailing list (see Resources_
below) when you find them.

See Also
""""""""
|hgignore(5)|_, |hgrc(5)|_

Author
""""""
Written by Matt Mackall <[e-mail]>

Resources
"""""""""
Main Web Site: https://mercurial-scm.org/

Source code repository: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg

Mailing list: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/mailman/listinfo/mercurial/

Copying
"""""""
Copyright (C) 2005-2017 Matt Mackall.
Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the GNU General
Public License version 2 or any later version.

.. include:: common.txt