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Re: Diff Question.

From: Gavin 'Beau' Baumanis <gavin_at_thespidernet.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 10:20:06 +1000

Hi Mike,

This particular file is one big difference regardless of tool used.

"Previously" ( for other files) the diff tools would report whitespace
differences as simply being that, whitespace differences or EOL
differences and the file would have "genuine code" differences as well
as the whitespace ones...
Thus maig it a little easier to see the "real" differences...

In this instance, this isn't happening... and sine I am using the same
IDE and the same tools as I always have.... well that's the confusing
part.... why is it not reporting appropriately this time?
It is proving a little difficult to see where the real differences are
when the file is being reported as being completely different in it's
whole.

Now why it would be "nice" to have a solution that would allow it to
report for minimal changes... the purpose of my post was to see if
there were any relevant solutions / procedures that peole would use
when faced with the same problem - as opposed to simply having to
traverse through the documents a line at a time.

Thanks again!

Beau.

On 07/09/2008, at 8:48 AM, Michael Maxwell wrote:

> Gavin 'Beau' Baumanis wrote:
> > None the less, the gui - dif tool in particular normally shows up
> > the difference by displaying eol / tab characters as being the
> > difference on a certain line.
> > And normally it is a line difference, Ie I end up with a diff
> > showing 100's of differences.
> >
> > Oddly from what I normally see, the diff is showing the entire file
> > as simply being 1 complete difference - which when in this
> > particular the case the file is 1200 lines, makes it a little
> difficult
> > to pick out the coding differences.
>
> Not sure I totally understand. It sounds like one diff program is
> showing hundreds of lines worth of differences, with each diff being
> a whitespace difference. The other diff program--the svn built-in,
> I guess--shows the entire file as being one big diff. Is that
> correct?
>
> If so, then I think the two diff programs are displaying the
> differences at different levels of granularity: your gui-diff tool
> displays the differences at the level of individual characters,
> while the svn diff simply says "this line is different in the two
> versions."
>
> If that's what's going on, then I expect that the svn diff is having
> trouble re-synching. That is, the numerous different lines are
> preventing it from recognizing that two identical lines (assuming
> there are identical lines, ignoring whitespace) are corresponding
> (as opposed, say, to being re-ordered with respect to some other
> sets of lines). You've run into the limitation in the algorithm (or
> more likely, the number of differences the implementation tolerates
> before it gives up; the algorithm could in principle wait millions
> of lines to re-synch, but that would take millions of seconds :-)).
> Have you tried the -d parameter (if your diff accepts this) to see
> if it will find a more minimal diff? (Of course, this hypothesis
> doesn't explain why the -w option doesn't give you a minimal diff.)
>
> Mike Maxwell
> CASL/ U MD
Received on 2008-09-07 02:21:19 CEST

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