Re: [PATCH 3/3] Teach 'diff' about 'nodiff' attribute.
- From
- Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
- Date
- Apr 13, 2007, 12:54 UTC
- Message-ID
- <200704131354.57056.andyparkins@gmail.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <461F6D74.63EF2769@eudaptics.com>
On Friday 2007, April 13, Johannes Sixt wrote:
Show 7 quoted lines
> Yet in Junio's introductory message, the example was > > * crlf !nodiff > > and it made me think: huh? And then again: huh? > > I don't mind if you call me dumb now, but even an intelligent person
Wouldn't dream of it.
> will have to think a second or two about the meaning. That's plainly > not necessary. In particular, where there can be no difference > between "diff" and "!nodiff".
As I said, I wouldn't like to make the call.
I understand your point - however I think I understand why Junio chose nodiff as the attribute. I would imagine that git /wants/ to show a textual diff for everything as its default. In that case, the attribute that you would assign to the least number of files is "nodiff". Mostly you want diffs, so the attribute implemented is for the special case and is "nodiff".
If I've understood the attributes system correctly, it's worth bearing in mind that "!diff" is not the same as "nodiff". The not in "!diff" means "supress the attribute diff", not as you would traditionally imagine "not-diff". In this case it doesn't matter because there are only two possibilities for the diff engine - show the diff or don't. However, more attributes might get added that aren't so simple.
Junio - This makes me think that perhaps "!" is not the right symbol for this - that's going to get read by programmers everywhere as NOT, rather than suppress. Perhaps it doesn't matter, I might be over-thinking this.
Andy
-- Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIET andyparkins@gmail.com