From: René Scharfe Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2017 18:19:48 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/3] xdiff: -W: include immediately preceding non-empty lines in context Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <1484324112-17773-2-git-send-email-vegard.nossum@oracle.com> Am 13.01.2017 um 17:15 schrieb Vegard Nossum: > When using -W to include the whole function in the diff context, you > are typically doing this to be able to review the change in its entirety > within the context of the function. It is therefore almost always > desirable to include any comments that immediately precede the function. > > This also the fixes the case for C where the declaration is split across > multiple lines (where the first line of the declaration would not be > included in the output), e.g.: > > void > dummy(void) > { > ... > } > That's true, but I'm not sure "non-empty line before function line" is good enough a definition for desirable lines. It wouldn't work for people who don't believe in empty lines. Or for those that put a blank line between comment and function. (I have an opinion on such habits, but git diff should probably stay neutral.) And that's just for C code; I have no idea how this heuristic would hold up for other file types like HTML. We can identify function lines with arbitrary precision (with a xfuncname regex, if needed), but there is no accurate way to classify lines as comments, or as the end of functions. Adding optional regexes for single- and multi-line comments would help, at least for C. René