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Re: What does 'svn diff' do?

From: Greg Hudson <ghudson_at_MIT.EDU>
Date: 2005-10-10 19:09:59 CEST

On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 22:20 -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> On 10/9/05, Malcolm Rowe <malcolm-svn-dev@farside.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > The _only_ advantage I can see for this behaviour is that it permits you
> > to see what local modifications have been performed to the file since it
> > was copied, if any. But I'm fairly sure that if you wanted to know that,
> > you could pass in the old and new targets explicitly: it shouldn't be
> > the default.

The advantage is that when you run "svn diff" to review what changes
you're about to commit, modifications you've made to add-with-history
files show up as modifications, rather than the entire contents of the
file.

Sure, you could specify the old and new targets explicitly, but when
you've got a mix of straightforward modifications and adds-with-history,
the usage becomes really muddled. So while there's an argument for
diffing adds-with-history against empty for definitional elegance, I
think it would detract from our usability.

I note we have this "--strict" flag, which we use for some other
commands when the default usage has been tweaked for usability reasons.

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Received on Mon Oct 10 19:11:21 2005

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