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Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of
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a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be
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used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.
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While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
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following information:
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- executable status and other permission bits
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- copy or rename information
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- changes in binary files
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- creation or deletion of empty files
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Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS
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which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced
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by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this
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format.
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This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
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(e.g. with :hg:`export`), you should be careful about things like file
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copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when
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applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra
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information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and
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pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary
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format for communicating changes.
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To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git
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option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]
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section of your configuration file. You do not need to set this option
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when importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.
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