From: Linus Torvalds Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:25:27 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Teach Git about the patience diff algorithm Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <1231359317.6011.12.camel@maia.lan> On Thu, 8 Jan 2009, Sam Vilain wrote: > > Whatever happens, the current deterministic diff algorithm needs to stay > for generating patch-id's... those really can't be allowed to change. Sure they can. We never cache patch-id's over a long time. And we _have_ changed xdiff to modify the output of the patches before, quite regardless of any patience issues: see commit 9b28d55401a529ff08c709f42f66e765c93b0a20, which admittedly doesn't affect any _normal_ diffs, but can generate subtly different results for some cases. It's true that we want the diff algorithm to be deterministic in the sense that over the run of a _single_ rebase operation, the diff between two files should give similar and deterministic results, but that's certainly true of patience diff too. Linus