Use .diff in tortoise mercurial tool

Question

I use Tortoise Mercurial tool to manage my mercurial repository. And I have a separate .diff file containin0g changes to a file in my repository.

Is there any way how to use that diff to update my file ?

thank you

Answer 1

Most Linux repositories comes with the patch program. You can then execute:

patch original.data difference.diff

Patch will modify the original.data file in such a way that if one would calculate the diff between the final and original state, one gets the same difference.diff again.

.diff files are in general not visible in a subversioning respository. They are stored internally to hide the several commits from the user. Diffs however can be usefull to analyze the difference between two commits. Say for instance somebody worked on your project and made a lot of commits, you might want to inspect what that person actually did without having to read the reports of all commits (since some changes can be undone in the next commit)