Reviewing changes
=================

Looking before you leap
-----------------------

Once you have completed some work, it's a good idea to review your changes
prior to permanently recording it. This way, you can make sure you'll be
committing what you intend to.

Two brz commands are particularly useful here: **status** and **diff**.

brz status
----------

The **status** command tells you what changes have been made to the
working directory since the last revision::

    % brz status
    modified:
       foo

``brz status`` hides "boring" files that are either unchanged or ignored.
The status command can optionally be given the name of some files or
directories to check.

brz diff
--------

The **diff** command shows the full text of changes to all files as a
standard unified diff.  This can be piped through many programs such as
''patch'', ''diffstat'', ''filterdiff'' and ''colordiff''::

    % brz diff
    === added file 'hello.txt'
    --- hello.txt   1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000
    +++ hello.txt   2005-10-18 14:23:29 +0000
    @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
    +hello world


With the ``-r`` option, the tree is compared to an earlier revision, or
the differences between two versions are shown::

    % brz diff -r 1000..          # everything since r1000
    % brz diff -r 1000..1100      # changes from 1000 to 1100

To see the changes introduced by a single revision, you can use the ``-c``
option to diff.

::

    % brz diff -c 1000            # changes from r1000
                                  # identical to -r999..1000

The ``--diff-options`` option causes brz to run the external diff program,
passing options.  For example::

    % brz diff --diff-options --side-by-side foo

Some projects prefer patches to show a prefix at the start of the path
for old and new files.  The ``--prefix`` option can be used to provide
such a prefix.
As a shortcut, ``brz diff -p1`` produces a form that works with the
command ``patch -p1``.