Re: [PATCH 0/3] Teach Git about the patience diff algorithm

["Adeodato Simó" <dato@net.com.org.es>]

* Linus Torvalds [Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:56:13 -0800]:

> On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Adeodato Simó wrote:

> > For me, the cases where I find patience output to be of substantial
> > higher readability are those involving a rewrite of several consecutive
> > paragraphs (i.e., lines of code separated by blank lines). Compare:

> I don't think that's a "patience diff" issue.

Ah, I see.

> That's simply an issue of merging consecutive diff fragments together if 
> they are close-by, and that's independent of the actual diff algorithm 
> itself.

> > I'll note that in this particular case, `git diff` yielded the very same
> > results with or without --patience. I don't know why that is, Johannes?
> > I'll also note that /usr/bin/diff produces (in this case) something
> > closer to patience than to git.

> See above - I really don't think this has anything to do with "patience vs 
> non-patience". It's more akin to the things we do for our merge conflict 
> markers: if we have two merge conflicts next to each other, with just a 
> couple of lines in between, we coalesce the merge conflicts into one 
> larger one instead.

> We don't do that for regular diffs - they're always kept minimal (ok, not 
> really minimal, but as close to minimal as the algorithm finds them).

> See commit f407f14deaa14ebddd0d27238523ced8eca74393 for the git merge 
> conflict merging. We _could_ do similar things for regular diffs. It's 
> sometimes useful, sometimes not.

Independently of patience diff, then, I'd very much support changes to
improve the diff I pasted.

-- 
Adeodato Simó                                     dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer                                  adeodato at debian.org
 
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore,
if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not
smart enough to debug it.
                -- Brian W. Kernighan