Re: [PATCH v2 00/18] Add `branch-diff`, a `tbdiff` lookalike

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: May 4, 2018, 16:21 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BEEgeo=5hkaTe8LrOMONSv3VdPi_cP4ADMC69oG3htC1g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <cover.1525448066.git.johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 8:34 AM, Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> The incredibly useful `git-tbdiff` tool to compare patch series (say, to see
> what changed between two iterations sent to the Git mailing list) is slightly
> less useful for this developer due to the fact that it requires the `hungarian`
> and `numpy` Python packages which are for some reason really hard to build in
> MSYS2. So hard that I even had to give up, because it was simply easier to
> reimplement the whole shebang as a builtin command.

tbdiff is awesome; thanks for bringing it in as a builtin to git.

I've run through a few cases, comparing output of tbdiff and branch-diff. So far, what I've noted is that they produce largely the same output except that:

- tbdiff seems to shorten shas to 7 characters, branch-diff is using
10, in git.git at least.  (Probably a good change)
- tbdiff aligned output columns better when there were more than 9
patches (I'll comment more on patch 09/18)
- As noted elsewhere in the review of round 1, tbdiff uses difflib
while branch-diff uses xdiff.  I found some cases where that mattered,
and in all of them, I either felt like the difference was irrelevant
or that difflib was suboptimal, so this is definitely an improvement
for me.
- branch-diff produces it's output faster, and it is automatically
paged.  This is really cool.

Also, I don't have bash-completion for either tbdiff or branch-diff. :-( But I saw some discussion on the v1 patches about how this gets handled... :-)

Elijah