Text delta interface

Dear folks working on text deltas ---

I've committed an interface to subversion/include/svn_delta.h, under
the heading "Text deltas", that describes the initial interface we
would like to have to the text delta generator. If you could
implement to that interface (and point out whatever problems you
encounter), that would be great.

The major points:

- The interface allows deltas to be computed in a stream-like fashion,
one section at a time. This means that the delta generator can handle
arbitrarily large datasets, without requiring similarly large amounts
of memory for itself.

- The interface provides a C representation of deltas as a sequence of
substring copies from the source string, the target string generated
so far, and a new data string. Among other things, the server will
use this form to combine a series of text deltas between successive
versions of a file into a single text delta describing the difference
between two distant versions.

- The interface provides functions for converting between the VCDIFF
delta format and the internal format.

We'll be adding to this interface over time, but I think everything
needed to talk to a basic delta engine is there.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:06 2006