view mercurial/help/dates.txt @ 25018:93e015a3d1ea

commit: add ui.allowemptycommit config option

This adds a config flag that enables a user to make empty commits.
This is useful in a number of cases.

For instance, automation that creates release branches via
bookmarks may want to make empty commits to that release bookmark so that it
can't be fast-forwarded and so it can record information about the release
bookmark's creation. This is already possible with named branches, so making it
possible for bookmarks makes sense.

Another case we've wanted it is for mirroring repositories into Mercurial. We
have automation that syncs commits into hg by running things from the command
line. The ability to produce empty commits is useful for syncing unusual commits
from other VCS's.

In general, allowing the user to create the DAG as they see fit seems useful,
and when I mentioned this in IRC more than one person piped up and said they
were already hacking around this limitation by using mq, import, and
commit-dummy-change-then-amend-the-content-away style solutions.

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