Re: improved diff tool

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 31, 2018, 09:28 UTC
Message-ID: <875zzqdgwg.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJmvCd1BwPNgZM+g7c6An-EESMHDOSGQe7RjkAAz36eNY3fvGA@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Aug 30 2018, Piers Titus van der Torren wrote:

> Is there interest to incorporate this algorithm in the main git
> codebase? And if so, any hints on how to proceed?

This looks very nice, it would be great to have it in git. I think it's more useful to focus on getting it into the git C codebase, the user base of gitk/git-gui is tiny by comparison.

Aside from what others have mentioned, maybe this commit helps to get an idea of how to do stuff like this: 3cde4e02ee ("diff: retire "compaction" heuristics", 2016-12-23)

I.e. it's one of our previous diff algorithms being ripped out. Grepping for the various --diff-algorithm=* options in "man git-diff" in the source/history should also give good ideas of where to start hooking in.

I see from your name / some brief spying on you via Google that you might be in the Amsterdam area. I'm not very familiar with the diff part of the codebase, but if you'd like I'd be happy to meet in person sometime to help you get started on various other stuff in git.git if you'd like.