Re: preferred diff format for CVS messages

On Feb 13, 2001, Jim Blandy <jimb@zwingli.cygnus.com> wrote:

> Do the folks with commit access generally prefer diff -u, or diff -c?

It depends. I generally prefer diff -u, except when a single hunk
contains multiple sequences of ``remove a few lines, add a few lines,
keep one or two lines unchanged''. Especially when the unchanged few
lines are blank-only or braces-only, and I happen to be replacing a
whole function with another. In these cases, unified diffs are
unreadable.

I wish there could be adaptive diffs that would use unified diffs on
most cases, and context diffs when the unified diff would be
unreadable. Some threshold would be used to tell whether the unified
diff is unreadable.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me