view mercurial/help/dates.txt @ 23871:b2d8f3685b06

dispatch: only check compatibility against major and minor versions (BC)

Extensions can declare compatibility with Mercurial versions. If an
error occurs, Mercurial will attempt to pin blame on an extension that
isn't marked as compatible.

While all bets are off when it comes to the internal API, my experience
has shown that a monthly/patch release of Mercurial has never broken any
of the extensions I've written. I think that expecting extensions to
declare compatibility with every patch release of Mercurial is asking a
bit much and adds little to no value.

This patch changes the blame logic from exact version matching to only
match on the major and minor Mercurial versions. This means that
extensions only need to mark themselves as compatible with the major,
quarterly releases and not the monthly ones in order to stay current and
avoid what is almost certainly unfair blame. This will mean less work
for extension authors and almost certainly fewer false positives in the
blame attribution.

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