Tom Lane wrote: > > ! <li>The patch should be generated in contextual diff format and > > should > > ! be applicable from the root directory. If you are unfamiliar > > with > > ! this, you might find the script > > <I>src/tools/makediff/difforig</I> > > ! useful. Unified diffs are only preferrable if the file changes > > are > > ! single-line changes and do not rely on the surrounding > > lines.</li> > > I'd like the policy to be "contextual diffs are preferred", full stop. > Unidiffs are more compact but they sacrifice readability of the patch > (IMHO anyway) and when you are preparing a patch you should be thinking > first in terms of making it readable for the reviewers/committers.
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This unified diff sentence was added recently, because I had a case where I was posting a diff, and a unified version was actually clearer than the context diff version because it was a file were we were changing discrete lines, rather than blocks of code. It might be a small enough number of cases that it isn't worth mentioning, but we have had people say they find unified diffs clearer, so I wanted to mention _where_ unified diffs are clearer, and where they are not. I thought this might encourage people to use content diffs more often if they understood _why_? -- Bruce Momjian http://candle.pha.pa.us SRA OSS, Inc. http://www.sraoss.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
