Globbing is usually used for filenames, so on windows it is reasonable and very
convenient that glob patterns accepts '\' or '/' when the pattern specifies
'/'.
Why?
- Mercurial internal patcher works correctly for regular patches and git
patches, is much faster at least on Windows and is more extensible.
- In theory, the external patcher can be used to handle exotic patch formats. I
do not know any and have not heard about any such use in years.
- Most patch programs cannot handle git format patches, which makes the API
caller to decide either to ignore ui.patch by calling patch.internalpatch()
directly, or take the risk of random failures with valid inputs.
- One thing a patch program could do Mercurial patcher cannot is applying with
--reverse. Apparently several shelve like extensions try to use that,
including passing the "reverse" option to Mercurial patcher, which has been
removed mid-2009. I never heard anybody complain about that, and would prefer
reimplementing it anyway.
And from the technical perspective:
- The external patcher makes everything harder to maintain and implement. EOL
normalization is not implemented, and I would bet file renames, if supported
by the patcher, are not correctly recorded in the dirstate.
- No tests.
How?
- Remove related documentation
- Clearly mark patch.externalpatch() as private
- Remove the debuginstall check. This deprecation request was actually
triggered by this last point. debuginstall is the only piece of code patching
without a repository. When migrating to an integrated patch() + updatedir()
call, this was really a showstopper, all workarounds were either ugly or
uselessly complicated to implement. If we do not support external patcher
anymore, the debuginstall check is not useful anymore.
- Remove patch.externalpatch() after 1.9 release.
This adds a " (glob)" marker that works like a simpler version of
(re): "*" is converted to ".*", and "?" is converted to ".".
Both special characters can be escaped using "\", and the backslash
itself can be escaped as well.
Other glob-style syntax, like "**", "[chars]", or "[!chars]", isn't
supported.
Consider this test:
$ hg glog --template '{rev}:{node|short} "{desc}"\n'
@ 2:20c4f79fd7ac "3"
|
| o 1:38f24201dcab "2"
|/
o 0:2a18120dc1c9 "1"
Because each line beginning with "|" can be compiled as a regular
expression (equivalent to ".*|"), they will match any output.
Similarly:
$ echo foo
The blank output line can be compiled as a regular expression and will
also match any output.
With this patch, none of the above output lines will be matched as
regular expressions. A line must end in " (re)" in order to be matched
as one.
Lines are still matched literally first, so the following will pass:
$ echo 'foo (re)'
foo (re)
