On 02-03-2024 19:02, Karthik Nayak wrote:
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.
As a human user, I would very much like to see this feature :) It helps
much to visually distinct things, but `git diff` sits way to deep in my
muscle memory to remember my alias. Also, we have a configuration system
to set configuration options for many things.
I wonder though, how many other configuration options we already have,
that potentially break 'random scripts' because the user has set it ...
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?
