[RFC] Patience diff & merge?

[Aaron Bentley]

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Hi all,

There are many ways of finding common subsequences in a pair of texts.
The Patience algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience_sorting),
implemented by Bram Cohen and tweaked by John Meinel seems to be a
better job of this than the standard Python functionality.

I have an updated branch of John Meinel's work here:
http://code.aaronbentley.com/bzr/bzrrepo/others/bzr.patience/

I would like to merge this into bzr, but some things may be
controversial.  Using Patience sorting for everything would cause bzr to
produce structurally different weaves for a given input.  They would
arguably be more useful weaves for annotation purposes, but nevertheless
~ different.  I haven't come up with a case where that would be a
problem, and perhaps no such cases exist.

So our options seem to be
1. Switch all our UI functionality, including three-way merge, to using
Patience.
2. Provide patience as an option for diff and merge
3. Switch all of bzr, including weave generation to using patience
4. Not do anything

Any preferences?

Aaron
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