view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 39899:f9232b0310ef

pullreport: issue a message about "extinct" pulled changesets

Changeset pulled from a remote repository while already obsolete locally can
end up hidden after the pull. Hiding obsolete changesets is a good behavior
but silently "skipping" some of the pulled content can get confusing.

We now detect this situation and emit a message about it. The message is
simple and the wording could be improved, however, we focus on the detection
here. Evolution is still an experimental feature, so the output is open to
changes.

In particular, we could point out at the latest successors of the obsolete
changesets, however, it can get tricky is there are many of them. So we delay
these improvements to another adventure.

Another easy improvement would be to merge this message with the previous line
about the new nodes and their phases.

This is a good example of cases where we can only transmit a limited amount of
data to users by default. We need some sort of "transaction journal" we could
point the user to.

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.