From: Matt McClure Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:48:16 GMT Subject: Re: difftool -d symlinks, under what conditions Message-ID: <3222724986386016520@unknownmsgid> In-Reply-To: <7vehfk5kn2.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Mar 12, 2013, at 4:16 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Matt McClure writes: > >> An alternative approach would be to reuse git-diff's option parsing > > I do not think you want to go there. That wouldn't solve the third > case in my previous message, no? I think I don't fully understand your third bullet. > * If you are comparing two trees, and especially if your RHS is not > HEAD, you will send everything to a temporary without > symlinks. Any edit made by the user will be lost. I think you're suggesting to use a symlink any time the content of any given RHS revision is the same as the working tree. I imagine that might confuse me as a user. It would create circumstances where some files are symlinked and others aren't for reasons that won't be straightforward. I imagine solving that case, I might instead implement a copy back to the working tree with conflict detection/resolution. Some earlier iterations of the directory diff feature used copy back without conflict detection and created situations where I clobbered my own changes by finishing a directory diff after making edits concurrently.