On 24.06.2011 17:50, C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> Having read and considered the replies received thus far, I'm dubbing this a
> non-issue and moving on. Thanks for the feedback, all who provided it.
Just for the record, this same issue has existed since "svn log" first
accepted the --verbose flag. I've not heard any screaming, so either
people don't parse "svn log" outputat all, or they don't use -v (or now
--diff), or they can handle the different output that these options produce.
Either way, not our problem.
-- Brane
> On 06/23/2011 03:15 PM, C. Michael Pilato wrote:
>> When we designed 'svn log' many moons ago, we added the "N lines" header
>> information to aid parsers of the output. Most of us had had poor
>> experiences with parsers looking for sentinel lines which could themselves
>> appear inside the delimited content. We didn't want to see folks writing
>> scripts around 'svn log' and trying to look for lines consisting of 72
>> hyphens, only to croak the first time someone's log message had -- you
>> guessed it -- a line with 72 hyphens in it. So, we provided the log message
>> line count. Parsers reader the header line, read any non-empty lines that
>> follow the header line, skip the first non-empty line, and then parse the
>> number of lines in the line count. Done deal.
>>
>> With the introduction of the --diff option, this algorithm goes to pot.
>> Parsers can't even fall back to looking for a separator line after the log
>> message, because the diff *could* carry the removal of a line with 71
>> hyphens in it (which is, of course, represented as a minus/hyphen followed
>> by 71 more of them).
>>
>> We discussed in IRC some solutions:
>>
>> - spool the diff, count the lines in it, and provide that count in
>> some fashion
>> - indent the diff by a single column
>> - wrap the whole diff in some start/end markers ("[[[" and "]]]", e.g.)
>>
>> Keep in mind that the diff itself might be provided by a third-party tool
>> ('svn log --diff --diff-cmd /usr/bin/shoot myfoot", as danielsh so
>> eloquently put it).
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>
