Re: [offtopic?] xdelta patch format wrapper

Junio C Hamano wrote:

My source files are 2 zipfiles that I know contain 1 xml file, and then
may contain any arbitrary files. As a specialised file format is a
pretty general case ;-) Because of compression, xdeltas of the zipfiles
aren't good. So what I want to do is to diff the 2 unzipped directories
- nothing git-specific, I could use diff -urN.

Git diff *is* better in that it handles binary files, but we pay a sizable cost in being reversible.

So I am thinking of doing is writing a wrapper that does the equivalent of the "urN" flags to diff, but uses xdelta as the diffing algorithm.

As my case is rather general I suspect I'm better off biting the bullet and writing something generally useful - it doesn't take that much more effort and if it ends up being popular, I'll have some help with its maintenance ;-)

In other words, I'm trolling for peer review to make sure the tool is sane, and will be useful to others ;-)

I don't think I'll use *any* git code at all for the time being. If it was trivial to produce a statically compiled git-diff.exe and git-apply-patch.exe that work without funny dependencies on any windows box then I would. Don't think any of the windows ports of git are there (even though they are excellent!).

cheers,

m