On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 09:38 -0400, Johan Corveleyn wrote: > But I don't like the hand-waving discussion that it will always be > superior, period. That's just not true. And it would be a big mistake, > IMHO, to only support a heuristic diff.
If it's a big mistake to use a "heuristic" diff by default, then adding options to change the diff algorithm will not mitigate this mistake. Similarly, adding options to support a heuristic diff as not-the-default is almost completely useless. I know from experience that it's very easy to stare at a problem for long enough to convince yourself that other people care about it as much as you do, but in reality, to a very good approximation, nobody wants to play around with diff algorithm options. There are probably a few dozen people out there who have configured "git diff" to use --patience by default and like it, but in the scheme of things, it's dead code. Options come at a cost in code complexity and documentation bulk. Supporting options for the sake of a very small fraction of users, without strong evidence of a compelling need for those users, is not the right tradeoff for a code base.
