Strange diff behaviour

[John Arbash Meinel]

Nicholas Allen wrote:
> I did a bzr diff -r X-1..X and bzr showed a diff that was the removal of
> the entire file and adding the contents again even though the only
> change was to one line. It must be a line ending issue but I don't see
> how it could happen as this was a revision committed by the tailor
> conversion tool so the line endings should be consistent with the other
> commits made by this tool...
> 
> Nick

My best guess is that it is a problem with the conversion tool. You can
determine some of this by doing:

bzr cat -r X-1 filename > orig.txt
bzr cat -r X filename > new.txt

And then inspecting those files directly.

One very easy cause could be that they didn't set up the SVN properties
properly, so the file actually did change line endings. This can happen
any number of ways, like it was CRLF, and someone set the svn:eol
property, which caused it to change storage format to LF, which meant
when checked out on Linux it changed from CRLF to LF.

I'd be happy to work you through what happened, but my best guess is
that it wasn't bzr, but something that actually happened in SVN. (tailor
could be at fault, but generally it just does 'svn update -r X; bzr
commit' so it never handles the file contents directly.

John
=:->