On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 9:06 PM, <sky5w...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thanks. I didn't know how binary was handled given the Timeline diff > response = "cannot compute difference between binary files". >
That message is a bit misleading. It really means a "visual difference." There isn't a mechanism to show a textual diff for binaries, and fossil's internal deltas and its text diffs are two completely different beasts. > I think it would be cool if instead fossil listed some of the metrics used > or determined in the binary delta operation. > The diff-related pages don't actually use the delta code (though diff/delta are logically similar, they are much different implementations). A delta blob does in fact know (without expensive processing) the size of the original blob and the size of the delta, so it might be feasible to do that. The unsightly part is that fossil doesn't really know what's a binary and what isn't (the delta algorithm is the same for all data). When performing a textual diff and it runs into any binary-looking data, it aborts the diff and assumes that it's binary. i.e. it would first need to run through the text diff and, as a fallback, generate statistics for a binary delta. Yeah, doable, but IMO horribly ugly because it would have to be done as a fallback for the diff generation, making it more expensive (computation/memory) than it really needs to be. -- ----- stephan beal http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/ http://gplus.to/sgbeal "Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do." -- Bigby Wolf
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