One case where patience diff does much better

John Arbash Meinel john at arbash-meinel.com
Sun Feb 26 18:06:36 GMT 2006


Martin Pool wrote:
> On 16 Dec 2005, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
>> Well, I have found a case where Patience diff does what I consider to be
>> much better, and why I wanted to use it in the first place.
>>
>> Attached is 2 versions of the same diff. It is my changes for
>> permissions to transport/__init__.py which changes some function signatures.
>>
>> You an see that difflib seems to get confused about what is actually
>> changing. While patience diff recognizes that the function signature
>> changes, and some of the documentation.
> 
> The diffs produced by matching on unique lines definitely do look
> better.  Do you think we should bring it in (perhaps not used by
> default), or are there still bugs to fix, or ..?
> 

Wow, resurrecting an *old* thread. :) I saw someone accessed the branch,
and wondered why. :)

Anyway, we had a couple small bugs, but I think it is fairly thoroughly
tested now.

If it isn't on by default, I don't think it will be used. I think a
reasonable test case would be to upgrade an existing bzr branch, and
make sure all of the sha1 sums match before and after (and haven't changed).

That will ensure that even if the algorithm is performing sub-optimally,
it is at least performing *correctly*.

In the past, I found a bug or two by doing that, so I think bzr.dev hits
all the important edge cases.

John
=:->

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