On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 02:10:59PM +0100, Christoph Berg wrote: > Re: Noah Misch 2017-04-07 <20170407021431.gb2658...@tornado.leadboat.com> > > > > I personally, and I know of a bunch of other regular contributors, find > > > > context diffs very hard to read. Besides general dislike, for things > > > > like regression test output context diffs are just not well suited. > > > > > > Personally, I disagree completely. Unified diffs are utterly unreadable > > > for anything beyond trivial cases of small well-separated changes. > > > > > > It's possible that regression failure diffs will usually fall into that > > > category, but I'm not convinced. > > > > For reading patches, I frequently use both formats. Overall, I perhaps read > > unified 3/4 of the time and context 1/4 of the time. > > > > For regression diffs, I use PG_REGRESS_DIFF_OPTS=-u and have never > > converted a > > regression diff to context form. Hence, +1 for the proposed change. > > I've just had another case of horrible context diff from pg_regress. > I'd claim that regression diffs are particularly bad for context diffs > because one error will often trigger a whole chain of failures, which > will essentially make the whole file appear twice in the output, > whereas unified diffs would just put the original output and the error > right next to each other at the top. Having to scroll through a whole > .out file just to find "create extension; file not found" is very > inefficient. > > It's nice that PG_REGRESS_DIFF_OPTS exists, but the diffs are often > coming from automated build logs where setting the variable after the > fact doesn't help. > > Please consider the attached patch, extension packagers will thank > you. > > Christoph
+1 for pushing this. Regression diffs can get pretty noisy even with it in place. Best, David. -- David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/ Phone: +1 415 235 3778 Remember to vote! Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate