On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 06:04 -0400, Julian Foad wrote: > Ah. An interesting point which I hadn't fully digested. I think the > gist of Branko's point is that the delta format doesn't distinguish > between
In the process of a blame operation, the server is already performing binary deltas (which aren't directly usable for blame) between each pair of revs. It wouldn't necessarily be any more work for the server to perform line-based diffs instead, although that would be the sort of text processing we don't ordinarily put into the server code. Alternatively, the server could perform a more diff-like binary delta, where the only instructions are "copy the next N bytes from the input" or "insert these new bytes." Such a binary delta could possibly be transformed into line-based diffs on the client, although I'm not completely sure of that.
