view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 14732:e9ed3506f066 stable

backout of d04ba50e104d: allow to qpop/push with a dirty working copy

The new behavior was breaking existing tools that relied on a sequence such as
this:

1) start with a dirty working copy
2) qimport some patch
3) try to qpush it
4) old behavior would fail at this point due to outstanding changes.
   (new behavior would only fail if the outstanding changes and the patches
   changes intersect)
5) innocent user qrefreshes, gets his local changes in the imported patch

It's worth considering if we can move this behavior to -f in the future.

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.