Re: Presenting net code changes for a branch

Branko Čibej wrote:

> On 23.10.2013 15:53, Julian Foad wrote:
>> Gabriela Gibson wrote on 13 October:
>>> my branch has grown into a veritable forest, and so, I thought that
>>> it would be convenient to present the net code changes
>>

>> ... and the discussion went on to address how to use "svn diff" in the

>> right way to show such changes, which is not exactly obvious.  The best

>> way is to go and investigate your merge history and then choose specify
>> the left hand side of the diff as the revision on trunk which you last
>> caught up to.  Is that really the best we can do?  No.
>>

>> This requirement is fairly basic and comes up quite often -- I have
>> recently heard from both customers and colleagues wanting to know how
>> to do it. I think we should have a built-in way to say "show me the diff
>> of this branch against the parent branch, specifically against the latest
>> catch-up point on the parent branch".  The attached patch implements this,
>> using '-g'/'--use-merge-info' to trigger it:
>>

>>   cd my-branch-wc
>>   svn diff -g ^/subversion/trunk .
>>

>> What does everyone think of the concept?  The user interface?  This
>> patch is by no means a complete solution, but simply to promote
>> discussion.
>
> Without the -g, please. Diff should just dtrt; it should know when
> branches are related, shouldn't it? And AFAICT, it already does the
> right thing.

Perhaps you missed the point.  Without '-g', "svn diff -g ^/subversion/trunk ." shows us the difference between the *current* state of trunk and the current state of our branch.  That's fine if you've just moments ago done a catch-up and told everybody else to hold off committing for a short while; but the use case we're addressing here is where want the diff between an *older* state of trunk (whatever state we last caught up to) and the current state of our branch.

- Julian
Received on 2013-10-23 18:10:55 CEST