From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2017 02:27:59 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] xdiff/xpatience: support anchoring a line
Message-ID: <xmqqwp2jvyhc.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20171121221717.155301-1-jonathantanmy@google.com>

Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com> writes:

> Teach the patience diff to support prohibiting a user-specified line
> from appearing as a deletion or addition in the end result.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>
> ---
> I'm sending this out to see if a change similar to this would be
> welcome. It is useful to me as a reviewer (to check my own code, e.g.
> when checking [1]). Probably more design needs to go into this,
> including the best way to specify the "anchor" line, and the correct
> behavior when the anchor is either not found or appears more than once.
>
> Any thoughts?

This is a natural extension of the idea the patience algorithm is
built upon.  If this were a cumulative command line option that can
be given to specify multiple lines and can be used across the diff
family, it would make a welcome addition, I would think.