On 28.01.2012 11:53, Johan Corveleyn wrote: > On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Branko Čibej <br...@apache.org> wrote: >> On 28.01.2012 10:44, Daniel Shahaf wrote: >>> Johan Corveleyn wrote on Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:10:05 +0100: >>>> Yes, it's an option. But it's a hassle. I'm investigating other options. >>> Installing GNU diff requires deploying a precompiled .exe file and two >>> .dll files into %PATH%. >>> >>> Implementing -F support in Subversion requires patching configure, >>> patching the windows build, revving the relevant libsvn_diff APIs, >>> waiting for the next minor release, and deploying it. >>> >>> Seems to me that the former is the path of least resistance. >> Especially for the 500.000 users of Subversion on Windows, compared to a >> few hours for one developer. Not to mention the wonders of DLL hell and >> the oh-so-standard Windows installer. > That was my thought as well. Though you're exaggerating just a bit :-) > ... only a fraction of those 500.000 users will be interested in 'diff > -F', and it'll be more than a few hours to get this into subversion, > with the extra work on configure, build, ... (and testing those). > > It's a pity we don't have any regex functionality already in svn, or > this would be a pretty quick win. I guess now it's not that clear cut: > is it worth it to include an extra dependency just for the sake of > this diff option? I'm not sure myself actually (I have little > experience with all this). Still it would be a nice addition to the > feature set, I think.
It'd certainly be better to somehow get regular expressions included in APR. However, since APR-1.x is now in maintenance mode, that would imply switching all of Subversion to APR-2.x, and I can't see that happening. We did fairly well without requiring regular expressions before ... and regex's are a bit of a temptation since the look like an all-purpose hammer, and many problems that could be solved without them suddenly depend on regular expressions. :) -- Brane