--- a/mercurial/help.py Mon Nov 17 11:45:38 2008 -0800
+++ b/mercurial/help.py Tue Nov 18 15:35:34 2008 -0600
@@ -216,34 +216,31 @@
gives 3, 4 and 5. Similarly, a range of 4:2 gives 4, 3, and 2.
''')),
- (['gitdiffs'], _('Git Extended Diff Format'),
+ (['diffs'], _('Diff Formats'),
_(r'''
Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions
- of a file is compatible to the unified format of GNU diff, which
+ 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 de facto standardized format is often enough, there are
- cases where additional change information should be included in the
- generated diff file:
+ While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
+ following information:
- executable status
- copy or rename information
- changes in binary files
- creation or deletion of empty files
- Mercurial adopted the extended diff format which was invented for
- the git VCS to support above features.
+ 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 there are very few tools which
+ understand this format.
- The git extended diff format is not produced by default, because
- there are only very few tools (yet) which understand the additional
- information provided by them.
-
- This means that, when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
+ 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 a different, binary
+ 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