Re: Followup: Managing EXCEL with git - diff problem.

From: John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>
Date: Apr 7, 2015, 13:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20150407132628.GI21452@serenity.lan>
In-Reply-To: <02d801d07132$159f76a0$40de63e0$@nexbridge.com>

On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 08:55:11AM -0400, Randall S. Becker wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> There was a discussion a while back on how to manage EXCEL content in git.
> This involved a simple trick of modifying the file extension from .xlsx to
> .zip and unpacking the file - resulting in a whole bunch of XML files. Git
> is happy with that part and the content can be managed - slightly.
> 
> Unfortunately, EXCEL stores its XML content in single lines. Git has no
> problem with that either, as far as managing the content, but the lines can
> be really long. However, after about 20K in size, while the config:
> 
> 	alias.wdiff=diff --color-words
> 
> The ability of git to report differences goes away - as in no output from
> git diff. This occurs on Windows and Linux under git 2.3.3 and git 2.3.0.
> I'm not sure whether this is a user error, a usage error, or an actual
> problem.
> 
> I had originally raised this as a SourceTree problem figuring it might be
> there: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-3145
> 
> Any advice (preferably no teasing - :-) - I am considering smudging but
> would rather avoid that)?

Perhaps try defining a specific diff driver for these files (see git-attributes(5)). There is an xmldiff program [0] that might be able to generate more useful diffs.

[0] http://www.logilab.org/project/xmldiff