feature question / request

[Jaroslav Hajek]

Hello,

first of all, I would like to thank all involved developers for
Mercurial, which does an excellent job helping us to develop Octave.
My question is:
We use a number of ChangeLog files in the source tree, that simply
collect short descriptions of committed changes.
(Not strictly necessary, but helpful). These ChangeLog files are,
however, a constant hassle when applying patches made against non-tip
revision or transplanting changesets into stable branches. They often
fail to patch due to mismatching previous entry.

Question: Is there any existing means how to solve this problem in Mercurial?
If not (or if it's complicated), I think that a relatively simple
solution is to somehow instruct Mercurial to use zero lines of context
when creating diffs for files matching a specific pattern
(*ChangeLog). Since entries are (almost) always prepended to the file,
that would make the patches apply smoothly and do exactly what we want
them to (prepend entries in the order they appear in a repo/branch).
The option could simply be switched off when making a more complicated
change to the ChangeLog file.
I don't think this is currently possible in Mercurial (if I'm
mistaken, please enlighten me), but perhaps something along these
lines would make a useful feature.

best regards,

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz