Re: diff between working copy dirs?

On Oct 13, 2009, at 09:12, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> This seems like it should be a FAQ, but while I saw a few related
> posts in the archives, there didn't seem to be anything definitive.
> Apologies if I just missed it.
>
> Anyway, I'm trying to do e.g.
>
> svn diff branches/my_branch trunk
>
> But it always reports no differences (and no error message, either).

"svn diff a b" doesn't mean "compare a with b and show the
differences". It means "compare a with the repository location for a
and show the differences, and compare b with the repository location
for b and show the differences". And there aren't any so it doesn't
show anything.

> Whereas if I try
>
> svn diff --old=branches/my_branch --new=trunk
>
> I get an error message about a usage that is "not yet supported".

I haven't used the --old and --new flags so I'm not sure about this
usage.

> It seems that my options are limited to either using full repository
> URLs for both targets, or using a local shell diff (with appropriate
> flags to exclude the contents of the .svn directories). Is that
> correct?

I think that's correct, those are your options.

> If so, what's the rationale for the limitation - potential confusion
> between the contents of the working directories and the contents of
> the corresponding repository URLs?
>
> It just seems like the sort of thing that "should work", but of
> course that's easy to say from the perspective of someone who hasn't
> tried to implement it.

I don't think of this as a limitation but rather you're just trying to
use "svn diff" for something it wasn't designed to do. It was designed
to do what I explained above.

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Received on 2009-10-13 23:14:36 CEST