Re: What mechanisms for code comparison and merge between versions on svn are used?

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Carlos Andrade <carlosviansi_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was interested on learning more about the mechanisms used on svn to verify
> if a certain code has been modified or not and how the merge function works.
> Is there any non-code documentation available for this? I would also be
> interested on knowing if svn employs any abstract syntax tree comparisons
> during this comparison between versions and merging (or maybe anywhere else)
> for any of its usage.

I'm not sure what you are asking for, but I'll try. Subversion just
treats files as streams of bits, and compares them (often using hashes
and mtimes) to see what has changed. Subversion does special case
known text files, based upon mimetype and some simple heuristics, and
when merging them uses line granularity to do so. We don't use any
language-specific comparison or merging.

> (I hope I hit the right mailing list since this is not usage related).

It's not development-related, either. :)

-Hyrum

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