Re: Resolution of 'svn diff' change?

On Mon, 2003-05-19 at 17:04, Brian Denny wrote:
> But really, *all* diff operations are comparative in nature

I agree, and I'd like to take this a little further:

We are always comparing two things. Sometimes we are narrowing the
scope of the comparison to particular files or directories within those
two things.

With the current syntax, when we "svn diff foo bar baz", we are
comparing the wc base with the wc, narrowed to foo, bar, and baz. When
we "svn diff -r 2:3 foo bar baz", we are comparing wc-url@2 with
wc-url@3, narrowed to foo, bar, and baz. When we "svn diff url@R1
url@R2", we are comparing url@R1 with url@R2, with no narrowing.

It's this observation which led me to propose "svn diff [-r M[:N]]
[--old=oldtarget] [--new=newtarget] [path ...]", and the more I think
about it, the more I think we'll be able to explain that command more
easily than we could explain anything else.

But if we do go with separate commands, I note that Perforce calls them
"diff" for the iterative case and "diff2" for the comparative case.
It's ugly, but it's relatively intuitive and we wouldn't be being
gratuitously different.

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Received on Tue May 20 05:07:29 2003