Re: [A few SCM lists] Diff/Comparison of file formats others than ASCII/source code?

[Alessandro Bottoni <al...@libero.it>]

On Wednesday 14 August 2002 02:43, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 23:08, Donovan Baarda wrote:
>> Any merge/diff3 operation must be file-format aware to get it right. Text
>> is a nice common denominator that the existing unix diff3 can handle.
>> Something like a HTML/XML/RTF aware diff3 could be relatively easily
>> implemented as a postprocessing stage to merges produced by the standard
>> diff3 because they use text as their underlying format.
>
>True, but not helpful. Most tools that export HTML export it without
>newlines, making line-based diff essentially useless.
>
>IBM has a decent DOM diff program for XML that could be readily adapted
>to HTML. I think that I'ld be inclined to go that way rather than try to
>hack up diff for this purpose.
>

Let me underline a strange situation...

Most, if not all, the RCS-SCM that I'm reviewing (wisely) delegate the 
Diff/Merge/Comparison of the files content to an external program so, in 
principle, most RCS-SCM can be adapted to every possible file format, from 
XML/HTML to RTF to 3D CAD models and so on.

Strangely enough, there are very few of such "file-format-specific" 
Diff/Merge tools around. This is strange because it is clear that such tools 
could have a huge market. Just think to how many companies have large 
repositories of CAD drawings, RTF (or, worse, MS Word) documents and HTML 
files (that is: web sites). A RCS tool that was able to manage such file 
formats would be of great help for a lot of people.

I hope that some developer of the list will think over this market 
niche (even if as a commercial, not open source, one).