view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 41247:a89b20a49c13

rust-cpython: using MissingAncestors from Python code

As precedently done with LazyAncestors on cpython.rs, we test for the
presence of the 'rustext' module.

incrementalmissingrevs() has two callers within the Mercurial core:
`setdiscovery.partialdiscovery` and the `only()` revset.

This move shows a significant discovery performance improvement
in cases where the baseline is slow: using perfdiscovery on the PyPy
repos, prepared with `contrib/discovery-helper <repo> 50 100`, we
get averaged medians of 403ms with the Rust version vs 742ms without
(about 45% better).

But there are still indications that performance can be worse in cases
the baseline is fast, possibly due to the conversion from Python to
Rust and back becoming the bottleneck. We could measure this on
mozilla-central in cases were the delta is just a few changesets.
This requires confirmation, but if that's the reason, then an
upcoming `partialdiscovery` fully in Rust should solve the problem.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D5551

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.