On Sat, Mar 2, 2024 at 6:03 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > This patch series adds the diff.wordDiff config option. This mimics the > > '--word-diff' option of `git-diff(1)`. > > Is it even be sensible to introduce this configuration variable in > the first place? What would this do to users who set this variable > and use third-party or their own scripts that run "git diff" under > the hood? This is definitely a good question to ask. I'm primarily not a user of this option, and this patch series was more of to start this discussion, based on the request. I'm comfortable dropping the patch series too if it doesn't make much sense. > > The usual answer is "these tools should be using the low-level > plumbing commands like diff-files, diff-index, and diff-tree", so I > am not worried about it too much myself, and the above is purely the > devil's advocate comment. > > Having said that, running > > $ git grep -e 'git diff ' > > in the collection of scripts I use [*] to work on this project, I am > reminded that I may have to be a bit more conservative than I > currently am about the risk of breaking scripts with the changes > like the one being proposed. > > The proposed feature also may break those who use the git-prompt and > diff-highlight available in conrib/, even though I am not sure how > badly they would break, because I only looked at the lines given by > this command: > > $ git grep -e 'git diff ' -- \*.sh ':!t/' > > and didn't check how the output from 'git diff' is used. > > > [Footnote] > > * They can be seen in the 'todo' branch, if anybody is interested. Having said that, wouldn't this cause a problem only if the config is set up? Meaning the user must explicitly set `diff.wordDiff` for their scripts to potentially break. In that sense, is it a breaking feature?
