view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 29429:cf99de051385

chg: send SIGPIPE to server immediately when pager exits (issue5278)

If the user press 'q' to leave the 'less' pager, it is expected to end the
hg process immediately. We currently rely on SIGPIPE for this behavior. But
SIGPIPE won't arrive if we don't write anything (like doing heavy
computation, reading from network etc). If that happens, the user will feel
that the hg process just hangs.

The patch address the issue by adding a SIGCHLD signal handler and sends
SIGPIPE to the server as soon as the pager exits.

This is also an issue with hg's pager implementation.

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.