The CVS design is not so married to the diff program that it could not be swapped out at a low level for more appropriate tools. (Keep in mind that somewhere in the CVS implementation it effectively invokes a "diff" or "diff3" command. That command could really be anything, as long as it's appropriate for the data type. However, RCS is strongly dependent on the diff program, so any change made there must have an extremely high degree of compatibility. Fortunately, RCS is only one of several places where diff is used within CVS, and the other places can use different tools.)
Deciding which tool to invoke is a bit of a trick, and opinions vary as to what is the best way to do it. I believe that the data type should be embedded in the RCS file, to be consulted by cvs to select the proper diff tool on the client side from a table. But this is an imperfect solution if a single RCS file contains multiple data types, which suggests that CVS should be sensitive to the content of the file when deciding which diff tool to use. And then there's simple filename pattern matching, which is easy to implement and is often "good enough". I demonstrated the viability of my claim by implementing a simple type-specific merge capability for the "cvs update" command. That patch was posted to this forum around Sept. 18, 2001. --- Forwarded mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED] I keep seeing questions and comments in the list about cvs diff, especially about how it is not useful for files holding data other than plain text. I see even Andreas Klauer's recent question "normalizing files and old revisions" (<http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2003-08/msg00194.html>) as a variation on this theme. In general, the concensus of those in the know has been negative: cvs diff is so far from working with arbitrary files that it is not even worth thinking about changing it. Nevertheless, I beg your indulgence as I put forward this preliminary proposal for changes. [proposal omitted] --- End of forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs
