On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I think it might be possible to just specify a special diff algorithm
> (git already supports that, obviously), and just introduce a new "use
> binary diffs with a textual representation" model.
Another model would be to just insert newlines in the data, and use
the regular textual diff on that "preprocessed" format.
The problem of *where* to insert the newlines is somewhat interesting,
since the stupid approaches ("chunk it up in 64-byte lines") don't
work with data insertion/deletion (all the lines will now be different
just because the data is offset), but there are algorithms that handle
that reasonably well, like breaking lines at certain well-defined
patterns (the patterns can then be defined either explicitly or
algorithmically - like calculating a hash/crc over the last rolling N
characters and breaking if the result matches some modulo
calculation).
Linus
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