From: Øyvind A. Holm <sunny@sunbase.org>
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 21:45:34 GMT
Subject: Re: Tackling Git Limitations with Singular Large Line-seperated Plaintext files
Message-ID: <CAA787rkoX=aEf3cs5LpPmKKOfKeAUQZ+3KqckofRjOfCaNP-+g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <53B15E64.9030005@gmail.com>

On 30 June 2014 14:56, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > .. even there, there's another issue. With enough memory, the diff
> > itself should be fairly reasonable to do, but we do not have any
> > sane *format* for diffing those kinds of things.
> >
> > The regular textual diff is line-based, and is not amenable to
> > comparing two long lines. You'll just get a diff that says "the two
> > really long lines are different".
> >
> > The binary diff option should work, but it is a horrible output
> > format, and not very helpful. It contains all the relevant data
> > ("copy this chunk from here to here"), but it's then shown in a
> > binary encoding that isn't really all that useful if you want to say
> > "what are the differences between these two chromosomes".
>
> There is also --word-diff[=<mode>] word-based textual diff, and I
> think one can abuse --word-diff-regex=<regex> for character-based
> diff... or maybe not, as <regex> specifies word characters, not words
> or word separators.

Yes, I have this alias defined:

  dww = diff --word-diff --word-diff-regex=.

It creates nice diffs on a character level. Sometimes specifying
--patience to this helps.

-- Øyvind