Re: [RFC PATCH, WAS: "weird diff output?" 2/2] xdiff: implement empty line chunk heuristic

> Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>>> What you have is a pure developer support; aim to come up with "good
>>>> enough" way, giving developers an easier way to experiment with, and
>>>> remove it before the feature is shipped to the end user.
>>
>> What are your thoughts on adding this do the gitattributes diff
>> section? Ie: modifications to the diff driver.
>
> I do try to foresee the future needs but I try to limit the forecast
> to "just enough so that we won't waste engineering effort on a wrong
> thing".  "It may need to be turned off conditionally" suggests we
> would want attributes added per path, and that is sufficient to make
> me say "don't waste time on bikeshedding configuration variable
> names, it will not be in the final product".
>
> We do not need yet to know what the final name of the attributes
> are, or how exactly the bit to affect the low level mechanism will
> be set by the attribute mechanism.  I do not think this topic is
> there yet, and it is a waste of engineering effort to prematurely
> trying to make things too flexible and customizable, when the thing
> that will eventually become flexible by conditionally enabled is not
> even there yet.
>
> As long as the low-level thing has a knob, set of internal bits, to
> enable and disable it, that is all that is necessary to know at this
> point.
>
> Having said all that, I'd expect we'd compute the right bit to use
> in the same place where we currently pick the custom textconv
> driver, diff backend, etc., by consulting the attribute system
> before running the diff.
>
> But again, I'd think it would be waste of time to think beyond that
> at this point, identifying exactly at which line of which source
> file the new code would go and what that new code would look like,
> until we are ready to start integrating it.