diff cmd syntax question for Old Hundred Eyes

As many have noticed, both "diff" and "merge" need to take up to two
paths, as well as two revisions. Currently, diff takes just one path
(and merge doesn't exist yet). I'm about to make diff take two paths,
for which we'll need a new command-line client syntax.

So, my proposal: let's add a new option (call it -R for now) which
takes a revision and a path as arguments. For example

   svn diff -RREV1:PATH1 -RREV2:PATH2

The -R can only appear exactly twice in a given command line. These
would be meaningless commands:

   svn diff -RREV1:PATH1
   svn diff -RREV1:PATH1 -RREV2:PATH2 -RREV3:PATH3

(Note that PATH can be a url or a wc path. In the latter case, we use
the wc path to deduce the proper url.)

Why do we need a new syntax? Because it's very difficult to overload
the old one without ambiguity resulting. For example, we cannot
simply do this:

   $ svn diff -rREV1:REV2 PATH1 PATH2

... because that already means something else: show two diffs, one for
PATH1 between REV1 and REV2, and the next for PATH2 between REV1 and
REV2.

Can anyone think of a nicer solution than the proposed -R syntax? I'm
certainly not wedded to it, just can't think of anything better.

-Karl

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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:37:00 2006