On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Andy Parkins wrote:
>
> Kompare just shows blank for diffs redirected from git. [ snip ]
>
> As you can see, it's a simple addition of the line "blah". Kompare shows this
> diff as blank. Now if I modify the file so that the "---" and "+++" lines
> both have "<tab>(something)" added:
I'd definitely call this a pure kompare bug.
Not only is the git patch format perfectly standard and accepted by other
tools, it's much better designed than the brain-damaged syntax that GNU
patch uses (which adds a tab and a timestamp after the filenames). In
particular, with git patches it is easy to get filenames that have spaces
and tabs in them right.
Now, if the kompare people can show that every single other patch
generator adds the stupid tab + date format, I guess we could do it too,
but
(a) there is no valid date in general to use, so it's a fundamentally
broken notion and
(b) I'm pretty sure that the kompare people only ever actually tested
with GNU patch or other very modern patches, because when I did the
patch apply logic (and designed the extended git format), I looked
around at things like "diffstat" that have been around a long time,
to see what they accept, and the whole thing is an unholy mess wrt
filenames.
The git format really is the best patch format I've seen by _far_, partly
because it's designed to be totally unambiguous even in the presense of
file renames (and new/deleted files, and file modes), but partly because
it's also designed to be both extensible and detectable (ie the marker
"diff --git " is there, so that you can _know_ and _depend_ on the git
format, unlike, for example, the GNU patches that don't have a good fixed
format).
I'm hoping that people will some day just wake up and notice that the git
extended patches are really worth doing even for other projects. I was
going to send in patches to GNU patch to try to make it at least
understand them, but I got lazy.
Linus
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