From: Ted Pavlic <ted@tedpavlic.com>
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:47:25 GMT
Subject: Re: diff settings
Message-ID: <4984AACD.20600@tedpavlic.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.GSO.2.00.0901310750470.5437@kiwi.cs.ucla.edu>

> Thank you for alerting us to the Hg design.  I can appreciate the elegance of
> it, and I'm always in favor of the most general possible implementation.  But
> there is a subtle difference between diff.primer and primer.diff.

As I already discussed, Mercurial has both "diff.primer" and 
"primer.diff" precisely because "diff" settings affects so many Hg commands.

In particular, in my .hgrc, I have:

[diff]
git = 1

which causes all Mercurial commands that need to generate a diff to use 
gitdiff rather than truediff. However, if I *wanted* to apply a set of 
flags to a particular command, I could (using the equivalent "git" 
commands)...

[defaults]
pull = --rebase
commit = -a
format-patch = -M

So I see a purpose for both *.defaults and defaults.*. Of course, 
aliases are also nice (IIRC, Mercurial doesn't have "aliases", but I 
could be wrong). Mercurial users are very happy with having both 
available. I imagine git people would be too.

--Ted


-- 
Ted Pavlic <ted@tedpavlic.com>

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