Re: diff wish

On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 09:38 -0400, Johan Corveleyn wrote:
> But I don't like the hand-waving discussion that it will always be
> superior, period. That's just not true. And it would be a big mistake,
> IMHO, to only support a heuristic diff.

If it's a big mistake to use a "heuristic" diff by default, then adding
options to change the diff algorithm will not mitigate this mistake.

Similarly, adding options to support a heuristic diff as not-the-default
is almost completely useless.

I know from experience that it's very easy to stare at a problem for
long enough to convince yourself that other people care about it as much
as you do, but in reality, to a very good approximation, nobody wants to
play around with diff algorithm options. There are probably a few dozen
people out there who have configured "git diff" to use --patience by
default and like it, but in the scheme of things, it's dead code.

Options come at a cost in code complexity and documentation bulk.
Supporting options for the sake of a very small fraction of users,
without strong evidence of a compelling need for those users, is not the
right tradeoff for a code base.
Received on 2011-06-15 17:15:53 CEST