On Wednesday 2007 April 04 14:34, Rogan Dawes wrote: > Well, how about my comments in <45E67978.9030805@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, > suggesting that the edit difference (number of steps required to > transform one to the other) would be a better indication? Perhaps. There is certainly a difference between: somefile.bin | 1000 -> 1000 bytes and somefile.bin | 500 bytes removed, 500 bytes added > I think it is better because it is consistent with what we currently do > for text files: show the number of lines added/deleted. The thing is, "lines" is an understandable unit for a text file, so it's useful to show. I'm not sure the same is true of "bytes" for a binary file. Those bytes could represent anything; the true unit of a binary file is dependent on its type. > For binary files, it would be consistent to show the number of bytes > added/deleted. I have not investigated the output format for the > libxdiff binary patch format, but hopefully it would not be too > difficult to calculate the deletions and additions. I'm inclined to agree with Johannes, while it's certainly something that /could/ be shown - is it more useful? There is no guarantee that a small change in the underlying content is represented by a small change in the binary diff. As an example: compress a file, change a byte, compress it again, perform a binary diff; what is that diff telling you about the change? (My answer is: not much). Andy -- Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIET andyparkins@xxxxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html