revlog: change generaldelta delta parent heuristic The old generaldelta heuristic was "if p1 (or p2) was closer than the last full text, use it, otherwise use prev". This was problematic when a repo contained multiple branches that were very different. If commits to branch A were pushed, and the last full text was branch B, it would generate a fulltext. Then if branch B was pushed, it would generate another fulltext. The problem is that the last fulltext (and delta'ing against `prev` in general) has no correlation with the contents of the incoming revision, and therefore will always have degenerate cases. According to the blame, that algorithm was chosen to minimize the chain length. Since there is already code that protects against that (the delta-vs-fulltext code), and since it has been improved since the original generaldelta algorithm went in (2011), I believe the chain length criteria will still be preserved. The new algorithm always diffs against p1 (or p2 if it's closer), unless the resulting delta will fail the delta-vs-fulltext check, in which case we delta against prev. Some before and after stats on manifest.d size. internal large repo old heuristic - 2.0 GB new heuristic - 1.2 GB mozilla-central old heuristic - 242 MB new heuristic - 261 MB The regression in mozilla central is due to the new heuristic choosing p2r as the delta when it's closer to the tip. Switching the algorithm to always prefer p1r brings the size back down (242 MB). This is result of the way in which mozilla does merges and pushes, and the result could easily swing the other direction in other repos (depending on if they merge X into Y or Y into X), but will never be as degenerate as before. I future patch will address the regression by introducing an optional, even more aggressive delta heuristic which will knock the mozilla manifest size down dramatically.

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.