[Pdx-pm] diff_painter.pl

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

* Matthew Wickline <m_pm_pdx at wickline.org> [2011-04-14 07:35]:
> I've added some examples. If you diff -u the before and after
> files you should get something like the png at
>
>    https://github.com/wickline/diff_painter/blob/master/examples/painted_diff.png
>
> Note that the bottom two block edits didn't render as block
> edits because a rows was added or inserted. The script does not
> try to merge lines when presented with N minus lines followed
> by other-than-N plus lines. It only wants to merge N minus
> lines with N plus lines.

Ahh. I see. That was the case I was hitting at least in several
of the cases it seemed to not be doing anything.

It finally worked fine on other diffs since, so it *is* working.

> Another case you might be hitting is that if too many edits are
> done in a line, it decides that it would look better to show
> you "this whole line changed into this other whole line" rather
> than trying to merge the two lines.

No. But there was one case where I had a single-line change where
into which I had inserted a short substring, that diff_painter
was not rendering as I expected, even though it seemed that it
should be able to. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the commit
in question so I can’t re-check now.

Was this possibly because `git diff` merged the one-line change
into a single diff hunk together with another change where one
line was split into three?

In that case it means diff_painter would be able to sprinkle its
magic on more of the diff if the context is reduced (`-U0` in the
extreme) – right?

If so then it would be better to split the diff hunks on its own
(ie collect +/- stretches between unchanged lines) instead of
only relying on the numbers in the hunk head, and then operate
on these sub-hunks. (Otherwise it’s useless for complex changes
best read using `-U999` to get a before/after of the whole file,
where it could do the most to help the reader.)

> As for input, basically anything that looks like diff or diff
> -u. That would include svn diff and git diff and git log -p.

Right, yes.

-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>