On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 11:54:21AM -0800, Alexey Neyman wrote: > On Thursday, January 31, 2013 09:08:20 am Stefan Sperling wrote: > > BTW, I went over one of FreeBSD's svn wiki pages a while back, and added > > answers to open questions on this page: > > https://wiki.freebsd.org/SubversionMissing > > Speaking of which: > > Is there a reason why it is necessary to use "the svn diff --old ^/somebranch > --new ." instead of the intuitive "svn ^/somebranch ."?
Would "svn diff ^/somebranch ." be synopsis 1? svn diff -rN:M ^/somebranch@HEAD .@HEAD (i.e. svn diff -rN:M ^/somebranch@HEAD; svn diff -rN:M .@HEAD; show the differences between rN to rM for ^/somebranch@HEAD and then show the differences between rN and rM for .@HEAD -- where N defaults to BASE if the target is a working copy path, and M defaults to HEAD) Note that you can also specify 3 or more targets: svn diff -rN:M ^/somebranch@HEAD .@HEAD ^/someotherbranch@42 ... Or would it be synopsis 2: svn diff --old ^/somebranch@HEAD --new .@HEAD (i.e. show the difference between the two (path, revision) pairs somebranch@HEAD and .@HEAD) ? > It has bugged me for a while until I discovered this --old/--new trick. I agree that --old --new syntax isn't intuitive at all. But I believe it exists to resolve the above ambiguity. The only remedy that comes to my mind is to introduce a new subcommand: svn compare TARGET1 TARGET2 which would equal svn diff --old TARGET1 TARGET2 I'm not sure if the community would like to see yet another new subcommand though :)
