view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 31987:8823daaf4665

obsolescence: add test for the "branch replacement" logic during push, case D2

Mercurial checks for the introduction of new heads on push. Evolution comes
into play to detect if existing branches on the server are being replaced by
some of the new one we push.

The current code for this logic is very basic (eg: issue4354) and was poorly
tested. We have a better implementation coming in the evolve extension fixing
these issues and with more serious tests coverage. In the process of upstreaming
this improved logic, we start with adding the test case that are already passing
with the current implementation. Once they are all in, we'll upstream the better
implementation and the extra test cases.

See inline documentation for details about the test case added in this
changeset.

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.