On Tue, 12 Apr 2016, Stefan Beller wrote: > On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 10:47 AM, Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > I started attempting to implement this heuristic within xdiff, but I > > am at a loss as to how xdiff actually works. I suspect this would go > > in xdi_change_compact or after it, but I really don't understand how > > xdiff represents the diffs at all... > > I agree that this seems like the right place. > > On the off chance that David, the author of xdiff remembers that > part, I cc'd him. (The whole discussion on better diffs is found at > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/290093) That was a zillions of years ago :) , but from a quick look at email thread, if you want to do it within xdiff, xdi_change_compact would be the place. The issue is knowing in which situations one diff look better than another, and embedding an if-tis-do-tat logic deep into the core diff machinery. In theory one could implement the same thing higher up, working with the unified diff text format, where maybe a user can provide its own diff post-process hook script. In any case, that still leaves open the issue on what to shift in the diff chunks, and in which cases. Which is likely going to be language/format dependent. IMHO, it gets nasty pretty quickly. -- 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