On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 4:18 PM Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > +DIFF ALGORITHMS > > +--------------- > > Please add some introductory words about what the headings refer to. ok. > > > +the shortest output. > > Trivia: the `minimal` variant of Myers doesn't guarantee shortest > output, either: what it minimizes is the number of lines marked as > added or removed. If you want to minimize context lines too, then > that would be a new variant. ;-) ... and take line length into account. ;-) It minimizes the edit distance in terms of lines, i.e. in a context-less diff we get the lowest number of lines possible. > > +This algorithm finds the longest common substring and recursively > > +diffs the content before and after the longest common substring. > > optional: may be worth a short aside in the text about the distinction > between LCS and LCS. ;-) > > It would be especially useful here, since the alphabet used in these > strings is *lines* instead of characters, so the first-time reader > could probably use some help in building their intuition. That makes sense. > > > +This is often the fastest, but in corner cases (when there are > > +many common substrings of the same length) it produces bad > > Can you clarify what "bad" means? E.g. would "unexpected", or "poorly > aligned", match what you mean? I'll just go with unexpected. > > +results as seen in: > > + > > + seq 1 100 >one > > + echo 99 > two > > + seq 1 2 98 >>two > > + git diff --no-index --histogram one two
