mercurial/help/diffs.txt
author Yuya Nishihara <yuya@tcha.org>
Thu, 23 Nov 2017 22:17:03 +0900
branchstable
changeset 35170 c9740b69b9b7
parent 12083 ebfc46929f3e
permissions -rw-r--r--
dispatch: add HGPLAIN=+strictflags to restrict early parsing of global options If this feature is enabled, early options are parsed using the global options table. As the parser stops processing options when non/unknown option is encountered, it won't mistakenly take an option value as a new early option. Still "--" can be injected to terminate the parsing (e.g. "hg -R -- log"), I think it's unlikely to lead to an RCE. To minimize a risk of this change, new fancyopts.earlygetopt() path is enabled only when +strictflags is set. Also the strict parser doesn't support '--repo', a short for '--repository' yet. This limitation will be removed later. As this feature is backward incompatible, I decided to add a new opt-in mechanism to HGPLAIN. I'm not pretty sure if this is the right choice, but I'm thinking of adding +feature/-feature syntax to HGPLAIN. Alternatively, we could add a new environment variable. Any bikeshedding is welcome. Note that HGPLAIN=+strictflags doesn't work correctly in chg session since command arguments are pre-processed in C. This wouldn't be easily fixed.

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.