What exactly is a Mercurial changeset?

Question

If you pull down a changeset are you pulling down the full copy of all files that were changed in the changeset?

Or are you pulling down some type of diff report which Mercurial will then apply to your repo when you do hg update?

Answer 1

You are pulling down a list of changes for each file.

More details at the site below.

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ChangeSet