view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 23923:ab6fd3205dad stable

largefiles: fix commit of a directory with no largefile changes (issue4330)

When a directory is named in the commit file list, the previous behavior was to
walk the list, and if no normal files in the directory were also named, add the
corresponding standin for each largefile in that directory.  The directory is
then dropped from the list, so that committing a directory with no normal file
changes works.  It then added the corresponding standin directory for the first
largefile seen, by prefixing it with '.hglf/'.

The latter is unnecessary since each affected largefile is explicitly referenced
by its standin in the list.  It also caused an abort if there were no changed
largefiles in the directory, because none of its standins changed:

    abort: .hglf/foo/bar: no match under directory!

This list of files is used to tweak a matcher in lfutil.updatestandinsbymatch(),
which is what is passed to commit().

The status() call that is ultimately done in the commit code with this matcher
seems to have some OS specific differences.  It is not necessary to append '.'
for Windows to run the largefiles tests cleanly.  But if '.' is not added to the
list, the match function isn't called on Linux, so status() would miss any
normal files that were also in a named directory.  The commit then proceeds
without those normal files, or says "nothing changed" if there were no changed
largefiles in the directory.  This is not filesystem specific, as VFAT on Linux
had the same behavior as when run on ext4.  It is also not an issue with
lfilesrepo.status(), since that only calls the overridden implementation when
paths are passed to commit.  I dont have access to an OS X machine ATM to test
there.

Maybe there's a better way to do this.  But since the standin directory for the
first largefile was previously being added, and that caused the same walk in
status(), there's no preformance change to this.  There is no danger of
erroneously committing files in '.', because the original match function is
called, and if it fails, the lfutil.updatestandinsbymatch() tweaked matcher only
indicates a match if the file is in the list of standins- and '.' never is.  The
added tests confirm this.

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.