Re: svn diff, svn merge, and vendor branches (long)

Eric Gillespie wrote:

>Then you aren't listening. If svn would simply hand off the
>files to diff(1) *regardless* of whether they're files, or
>directories, or widgets, you'd get meaningful results where
>possible or equally useless results where not.
>

Blech. What you're saying is that we should never implement an internal
diff/patch library, but should forever use a program that is simply not
good enough for our needs.

Yes, diff is _not_ good enough: a) it knows nothing about common
ancestry, b) it knows nothing about tree reorganizations. So we already
have to do a lot of work _before_ calling diff to get output that's even
close to sensible.

>To prove this to yourself, just do a svn export of any two URLs
>you are curious about and diff -r the two resulting directories.
>
That's a totally different case.

So now I'll hear a shout "but patch doesn't understand those diffs, so
they're useless!" Quite the contrary -- it's patch that's "useless",
because -- like diff -- it can't handle renames.

-- 
Brane Čibej   <brane_at_xbc.nu>   http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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