Re: Add comment lines to patch format

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 19, 2012, 00:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20120519001410.GC765@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20120518132228.GA27970@do>

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 08:22:28PM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> One thing is trailing space, like demonstrated in the patch below,
> because trailing spaces may be intentional sometimes. But I'd like to
> incorporate some word-diff goodness in patch format using this comment
> line to spot few/single character addition/removal.
> [...]
> If anyone knows a tool with similar feature, I'd greatly appreciate it
> (as the Internet taught me, everything I think of is already thought
> of/implemented by someone)

Have you looked at contrib/diff-highlight?

I think your approach is interesting because it can annotate much more than just "this part is interesting". Sometimes when I send a patch, I'd like to be able to comment in-line, like:

  +       if (bar > 3)
  +               foo(bar);
  = Yeah, this magic "3" is ugly, and we should handle it
  = through $whatever in the re-roll.
  +       else
  +               something_else();

I usually just write something in the cover letter, or reply to myself with comments inline. I don't know how much I would use it in practice, but it might be a neat thing for "git apply" to simply ignore comment lines in the middle of a hunk.

Of course, this feature might not be worth breaking compatibility with every existing version of "git apply" and "patch" out there.

-Peff