human readable diffs, was Re: [PATCH v2] config: Use parseopt.

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 14, 2009, 21:08 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0902142157000.10279@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <7viqncsreo.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Sat, 14 Feb 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>     I also noticed that the diff was impossible to read because it 
>     matched the lines with only an indented close brace or whitespace 
>     between the preimage and the postimage too aggressively.  Your 
>     --patience did seem to help a little bit, at least it produced a 
>     different result, but not much (not that patience was meant to make 
>     this kind of change easier to read).  It may have helped if we had 
>     that "do not match trivial lines too aggressively just to reduce the 
>     patch size" option.

Yeah, I think that your objections to my '--collapse-non-alnums' patch show to be relevant especially with this patch: an '} else {' matches, but actually disturbs readability.

So an option would be nice, indeed, which can merge a single matching line (or a given maximal number of matching lines) between runs of a certain minimal number of _non-matching_ lines.

But how to call it?

And how determine the ideal ratio between matching/non-matching lines until which to consider the matching lines to be non-matches? Maybe a simple fraction would be enough...

Or maybe an absolute number of matching lines? But it is obvious how to construct a case where this breaks down.

Ciao, Dscho