view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 41987:c1d83d916e85

revert: option to choose what to keep, not what to discard

I know the you (the reader) are probably tired of discussing how `hg
revert -i -r .` should behave and so am I. And I know I'm one of the
people who argued that showing the diff from the working copy to the
parent was confusing. I think it is less confusing now that we show
the diff from the parent to the working copy, but I still find it
confusing. I think showing the diff of hunks to keep might make it
easier to understand. So that's what this patch provides an option
for.

One argument doing it this way is that most people seem to find `hg
split` natural. I suspect that is because it shows the forward diff
(from parent commit to the commit) and asks you what to put in the
first commit. I think the new "keep" mode for revert (this patch)
matches that.

In "keep" mode, all the changes are still selected by default. That
means that `hg revert -i` followed by 'A' (keep all) (or 'c' in
curses) will be different from `hg revert -a`. That's mostly because
that was simplest. It can also be argued that it's safest. But it can
also be argued that it should be consistent with `hg revert -a`.

Note that in this mode, you can edit the hunks and it will do what you
expect (e.g. add new lines to your file if you added a new lines when
editing). The test case shows that that works.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D6125

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.