Re: svn blame and code reformatting

twall wrote:
> Given an "ignore-X" feature, does it make sense to hard-code it to whitespace or
> could it easily be extended to be any regular expression? I'm thinking of some
> files like this:
>
> <file path="xyzzy" modified="12pm EST"/>
> <file path="xyzzy" modified="5pm GMT"/>
>
> Where I want to effectively do 's/modified=".*"/modified=""/' prior to the diff.

Is it really so hard to ignore the one line that the above should
display for each file so affected? Subversion does not currently
require _any_ regex engine (the current code has a very limited '*'
matching algorithm). I don't think this use-case is important enough to
justify pulling in a cross-platform regex engine (which is really a very
specialize state machine in its own language), though libpcre is very
fine (and builds on Windows, FWIW).

One thing I glossed over is that although GNU's diff supports
--ignore-space-change and --ignore-all-space, it does so from strictly a
Latin-1 understanding of whitespace (tab, vtab, and space, I believe).
Subversion is Unicode internally, so there is a much fatter target (does
Subversion even support the Unicode Property Lists?). There was a
certain amount of handwaving involved in my proposal... ;-)

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
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