view mercurial/helptext/diffs.txt @ 47120:7109a38830c9

dirstate-tree: Fold "tracked descendants" counter update in main walk

For the purpose of implementing `has_tracked_dir` (which means "has tracked
descendants) without an expensive sub-tree traversal, we maintaing a counter
of tracked descendants on each "directory" node of the tree-shaped dirstate.

Before this changeset, mutating or inserting a node at a given path would
involve:

* Walking the tree from root through ancestors to find the node or the spot
  where to insert it
* Looking at the previous node if any to decide what counter update is needed
* Performing any node mutation
* Walking the tree *again* to update counters in ancestor nodes

When profiling `hg status` on a large repo, this second walk takes times
while loading a the dirstate from disk.

It turns out we have enough information to decide before he first tree walk
what counter update is needed. This changeset merges the two walks, gaining
~10% of the total time for `hg update` (in the same hyperfine benchmark as
the previous changeset).

---

Profiling was done by compiling with this `.cargo/config`:

    [profile.release]
    debug = true

then running with:

    py-spy record -r 500 -n -o /tmp/hg.json --format speedscope -- \
    ./hg status -R $REPO --config experimental.dirstate-tree.in-memory=1

then visualizing the recorded JSON file in https://www.speedscope.app/

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D10554

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.