view mercurial/helptext/dates.txt @ 45095:8e04607023e5

procutil: ensure that procutil.std{out,err}.write() writes all bytes

Python 3 offers different kind of streams and it’s not guaranteed for all of
them that calling write() writes all bytes.

When Python is started in unbuffered mode, sys.std{out,err}.buffer are
instances of io.FileIO, whose write() can write less bytes for
platform-specific reasons (e.g. Linux has a 0x7ffff000 bytes maximum and could
write less if interrupted by a signal; when writing to Windows consoles, it’s
limited to 32767 bytes to avoid the "not enough space" error). This can lead to
silent loss of data, both when using sys.std{out,err}.buffer (which may in fact
not be a buffered stream) and when using the text streams sys.std{out,err}
(I’ve created a CPython bug report for that:
https://bugs.python.org/issue41221).

Python may fix the problem at some point. For now, we implement our own wrapper
for procutil.std{out,err} that calls the raw stream’s write() method until all
bytes have been written. We don’t use sys.std{out,err} for larger writes, so I
think it’s not worth the effort to patch them.

Some commands allow the user to specify a date, e.g.:

- backout, commit, import, tag: Specify the commit date.
- log, revert, update: Select revision(s) by date.

Many date formats are valid. Here are some examples:

- ``Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006`` (local timezone assumed)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 -0600`` (year assumed, time offset provided)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 UTC`` (UTC and GMT are aliases for +0000)
- ``Dec 6`` (midnight)
- ``13:18`` (today assumed)
- ``3:39`` (3:39AM assumed)
- ``3:39pm`` (15:39)
- ``2006-12-06 13:18:29`` (ISO 8601 format)
- ``2006-12-6 13:18``
- ``2006-12-6``
- ``12-6``
- ``12/6``
- ``12/6/6`` (Dec 6 2006)
- ``today`` (midnight)
- ``yesterday`` (midnight)
- ``now`` - right now

Lastly, there is Mercurial's internal format:

- ``1165411109 0`` (Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006 UTC)

This is the internal representation format for dates. The first number
is the number of seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00 UTC). The
second is the offset of the local timezone, in seconds west of UTC
(negative if the timezone is east of UTC).

The log command also accepts date ranges:

- ``<DATE`` - at or before a given date/time
- ``>DATE`` - on or after a given date/time
- ``DATE to DATE`` - a date range, inclusive
- ``-DAYS`` - within a given number of days of today