Hi! I am using patches frequently, however, 'svn diff' and 'svn patch' commands currently have several limitations:
1. They do not track tree changes (like copies and moves) 2. Binary file modifications are not tracked in plain-text patches 3. Unidiff patches use 2-way merge instead of 3-way merge, so in case of conflict, the patch/hunk/file/directory will be rejected. The ideas I would suggest to solve these problems will be explained below: 1. Add `svn diff --xpatch` for creating binary patches. 2. Add `svn merge --xpatch FILENAME` for applying them onto a working copy. 3. Optionally, we can also implement several commands to browse xpatch files using the command-line interface. For example, previewing them as unidiff or showing the diff-summary. In my opinion, the best way to save the changes is to write them to an XML file/stream (btw, this is why I would name this feature as "[x]patch"). I will explain the format in detail soon. Recently, I was doing research about how the merge works and about the ways to reuse its implementation for creating some kind of binary patches. It is currently implemented using a svn_diff_tree_processor, which applies the differences, resolves conflicts. I.e. it edits the working copy and resolves the conflict cases. However, there are some technical limitations in the current merge implementation, which prohibit it to be used outside of the merge command, but the merge implementation can be split onto two files; the merge itself and the "apply" tree-processor. I have a prototype of factoring-out the "apply" tree-processor from merge. In general it seems to be working with most test cases passing. Additionally, as you might already have seen, I committed some improvements a while ago, which are related to this. I am planning to do the following to implement binary patches: 1. Factor-out "apply" tree-processor from merge.c to another file of private client API. 2. Do some preparations for xpatching in the 'trunk'. 3. Create a branch for the xpatch feature. 4. Implement writer and parser for xpatch files in the branch. 5. Add`svn diff -–xpatch` and `svn merge -–xpatch` commands by connecting diff driver, xpatch file routines, and "apply" tree-processor together in the same branch. I have a working prototype of xpatch file writer and parser, but it seems to be far from ready. -- Timofei Zhakov
