Tony Peden wrote: > Andy Ross wrote: > > + They're more human readable. Inevitably, you're going to be doing a > > diff between revisions to see what's changed anyway. This just give > > it to you up front. If you want to look at more surrounding code, > > you certainly can, but everyone starts with the diff anyway. > > Hardly. A side by side diff program such as gtkdiff or xxdiff (no > doubt emacs has such a feature as well) is human readable. You have > obviously taken the time to learn how to read a patch and become > comfortable with it, but I can't imagine they were ever *meant* to be > human readable.
I don't quite not how to respond here, except to point out that simply isn't the case. The "diff" program was always meant to be human readable from the very beginning. And it's gotten more so over time, witness the "unified" vs. "traditional" format -- the whole purpose there was readability. I mean, rather than spout, try to think of a format for this problem that would be any more readable. Diff is easy, diff is obvious: here are some lines that used to be there and are gone, they have a "-" in front to indicate subtraction. Here are some lines that have been added, they have a "+" prepended. Around them are some context lines with no prefix to show you where you are. I mean, how much simpler can it get? [The above describes "unified" diff format -- traditional format used a ">" instead of "+" and "<" instead of "-", and provided no context lines, making both reading and automated merging harder] Your response indicates to me that what you really want isn't a file format at all, but a GUI viewer for the file changes. You realize the gtxdiff, xxdiff and emerge (the emacs tool you posit) work *natively* with patchfiles, right? I mean, that's what they do -- display file diffs for the user. There's absolutely no reason you can't continue to use these tools with patches; and in fact I'll bet money that feeding them patches is *easier* than whole files. Quite honestly, Tony, I think you've fallen prey to the "patch phobia" that I talked about. It's not nearly (I mean, not even close, not hardly, just *not*) so difficult or intractable a format as you think it is. The /usr/bin/patch program (and not the diff file format) is a little goofy sometimes, but the format is as simple as they come. Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
