On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:05 PM, Andrew Robbins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello everyone, > > I have been working on a character-based diff algorithm for making certain > hunk patches easier to read. In situations where there is quite a lot of > tab-conversion, this may also tend to compress patches as well. Initially, > the idea was to make a separate "diff -u" like tool that would not only > print changes of lines, but also changes _within_ lines. I have talked with > lispy about this, who encouraged me to post to this list. Since there is > already a bug about this ( > http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2006-October/004915.html ) I > would like to incorporate these ideas into Darcs, if possible. Yes please do! BTW, I'm lispy on freenode. > > The ModifyLine patch type affects a subset of what the Hunk patch type > affects, which means they should commute and merge similar to Hunk patches. > When commuting two ModifyLine patches, it is much easier than with Hunk > patches, since they do not change the indices of any lines, only the indices > of characters within a line. When merging two ModifyLine patches with > themselves, however, it is about as hard as Hunk patches, since the > complexity of context-sensitive indices that existed at the line-level has > been brought down to the character-level. In order to represent these > patches, one could consider a list of ModifyLine patches of the form (1) > which requires more processing after canonization, or a single ModifyLine > patch of the form (3) which requires more processing during canonization. > Each would have certain repercussions, and I think it is best to have a > discussion about this. I'm CC'ing David in hopes that this will spark his interest so he can comment on the patch theory implications. I seem to recall a big part of the motivation for David to create darcs was indentation patches :) > I have already done some initial work on adding this new patch type, and I > am willing to do anything needed to polish off all the commuting and merging > algorithms to accommodate the new patch type. Just thought it would be a > good idea to tell someone. Yes, collaborate early and often. Any suggestions, comments? Do you have the code somewhere that we can look at it? Thanks! Jason
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