On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Greg Hudson <ghudson_at_mit.edu> wrote:
> 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.
Okay, I guess we should then also rip out --ignore-space-change and
--ignore-eol-style, and perhaps --show-c-function. Or, if it's
preferred that ignore-space-change and ignore-eol-style be used by
default ("because humans are normally not interested in changes in
amount of whitespace"), we should use those options by default, and
not provide an option to disable them. Fine by me.
--
Johan
Received on 2011-06-15 17:30:55 CEST