view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 40626:87a872555e90

revlog: detect incomplete revlog reads

_readsegment() is supposed to return N bytes of revlog revision
data starting at a file offset. Surprisingly, its behavior before
this patch never verified that it actually read and returned N
bytes! Instead, it would perform the read(), then return whatever
data was available. And even more surprisingly, nothing in the
call chain appears to have been validating that it received all
the data it was expecting.

This behavior could lead to partial or incomplete revision chunks
being operated on. This could result in e.g. cached deltas being
applied against incomplete base revisions. The delta application
process would happily perform this operation. Only hash
verification would detect the corruption and save us.

This commit changes the behavior of raw revlog reading to validate
that we actually read() the number of bytes that were requested.
We will raise a more specific error faster, rather than possibly
have it go undetected or manifest later in the call stack, at
delta application or hash verification.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D5266

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.