On 28.01.2012 11:53, Johan Corveleyn wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Branko Čibej <brane_at_apache.org> wrote:
>> On 28.01.2012 10:44, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
>>> Johan Corveleyn wrote on Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:10:05 +0100:
>>>> Yes, it's an option. But it's a hassle. I'm investigating other options.
>>> Installing GNU diff requires deploying a precompiled .exe file and two
>>> .dll files into %PATH%.
>>>
>>> Implementing -F support in Subversion requires patching configure,
>>> patching the windows build, revving the relevant libsvn_diff APIs,
>>> waiting for the next minor release, and deploying it.
>>>
>>> Seems to me that the former is the path of least resistance.
>> Especially for the 500.000 users of Subversion on Windows, compared to a
>> few hours for one developer. Not to mention the wonders of DLL hell and
>> the oh-so-standard Windows installer.
> That was my thought as well. Though you're exaggerating just a bit :-)
> ... only a fraction of those 500.000 users will be interested in 'diff
> -F', and it'll be more than a few hours to get this into subversion,
> with the extra work on configure, build, ... (and testing those).
>
> It's a pity we don't have any regex functionality already in svn, or
> this would be a pretty quick win. I guess now it's not that clear cut:
> is it worth it to include an extra dependency just for the sake of
> this diff option? I'm not sure myself actually (I have little
> experience with all this). Still it would be a nice addition to the
> feature set, I think.
It'd certainly be better to somehow get regular expressions included in
APR. However, since APR-1.x is now in maintenance mode, that would imply
switching all of Subversion to APR-2.x, and I can't see that happening.
We did fairly well without requiring regular expressions before ... and
regex's are a bit of a temptation since the look like an all-purpose
hammer, and many problems that could be solved without them suddenly
depend on regular expressions. :)
-- Brane
Received on 2012-01-28 13:12:55 CET