On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 11:54 AM Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi Stefan, > > On Mon, 13 Aug 2018, Stefan Beller wrote: > > > > > The later lines that indicate a change to the Makefile will be treated as > > > > context both in the outer and inner diff, such that those lines stay > > > > regular color. > > > > > > While I am a fan of having those lines colored correctly, I have to admit > > > that I am not exactly enthusiastic about that extra indentation... > > > > > > Otherwise, this looks good to me. > > > > Can you explain what makes you less enthused about the indentation? > > > > Advantage: > > * allows easy coloring (easy implementation) > > Disadvantage: > > * formats change, > > This is it. It breaks my visual flow. > > > but the range diff is still in its early design phase, so we're not > > breaking things, yet? > > Indeed. We're not breaking things. If you feel strongly about it, we can > have that indentation, I *can* get used to it. I only feel strongly about it now as that is the *easiest* way to make the colors look like I want them to look. And I really value colors in the range-diff. Earlier you said that color-less range-diff is nearly useless for you and I thought it was hyperbole, but by now I realize how much truth you spoke. So getting the colors fixed to not markup files (+++/ --- lines of the inner diff) is a high priority for me. So high that I would compromise on the indentation/flow of these corner case areas. > > (Do we ever plan on sending range-diff patches that can be applied to > > rewrite history? I am very uncertain on such a feature request. It > > sounds cool, though) > > I remember that I heard you discussing this internally. I am not too big a > fan of this idea, I have to admit. The range diff seems more designed to > explain how a patch series evolved, rather than providing machine-readable > data that allows to recreate said evolution. For example, the committer > information as well as the date are missing, which would preclude a > faithful reconstruction. > Ah! good point. Though we could just work around that and use the email date for the new author dates. ;-) > And that is not all: if you wanted to "apply" a range diff, you would need > to know more about the base(s) of the two commit ranges. You would need to > know that they are at least very similar to the base onto which you want > to apply this. You would say so in the cover letter "This is a resend of sb/range-diff-colors" and by the knowledge of that tip only and the range-diff you would know how the new series would look like, even if it was rebased. > And quite seriously, this would be the wrong way to go in my mind. We have > a very efficient data format to transport all of that information: the Git > bundle. The bundle format is very efficient for machine transport, but I thought the whole point of the mailing list was easy human readable parts, i.e. you can point out things in a diff, which you could also do in a range-diff to some extend. We would loose some of the "fresh eyes" as you'd only see the changed part of the series. :-/ So yeah even for the workflow this seems a net-negative. I just thought it would be cool. > Let's not overload the range diff format with multiple, partially > contradicting purposes. Think "separation of concerns". It's the same > issue, really, as trying to send highly structured data such as bug > reports or code contributions via a medium meant to send unstructured > plain or formatted text back and forth between human beings. ok. Thanks, Stefan
