On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Manuel Klimek <[email protected]> wrote:

> I think the main reasons why using a structured format instead of patches
> here are:
> The upside of "patch" formats doesn't apply here: patches are great if you
> want them to apply on potentially unknown slightly different revisions.
> Otherwise I don't see big pros for patches.
> On the other hand, patches have a major downside here:
> a) they're too coarse - they're usually line based; refactoring tools
> often need to handle replacements that fix stuff (non-overlapping) on the
> same line
> b) they're hard to "work with" other than applying them; patch libraries
> usually just give you that, so if you want to extract the exact ranges on
> what is changing (for example to do deduplication, or to do other location
> based calculations) you're re-writing your own patch-parsing code
> c) they're much harder to generate from a clang-tool;
> offset+length+replacement is something you just "have", no need to
> construct the actual end-result and run algorithms over the strings in the
> tool
>
> To me patches are basically an optional 3rd level interface here, but we
> need something more fine grained in a structured format. Using YAML (or
> JSON) seems an obvious choice for that in the llvm context.
>

All of this sounds like a great email to have on an email thread that
actually is discussing the design. This is a reply N replies down on a
commit with build bot failures mixed in. This needs to be discussed in a
better forum.
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