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Posted to dev@subversion.apache.org by Riccardo Poli <Pr...@gmail.com> on 2008/04/10 08:36:28 UTC
Feature Request: wordwise diff
Hi,
I've recently written a book with two colleagues (CCed) using
subversion as our revision control system (our sources were Latex,
Bibtex and postscript/pdf files). (Incidentally, the book is freely
available on the internet from http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/)
Subversion was wonderful, but we found one significant problem. One of
us was using an editor which would keep an entire paragraph as a
single very long line of text. This meant that a clash, say caused by
a very small change in the paragraph, would result in subversion
reporting a difference in a large chunck of text without any
indication of exactly which bit of the text had caused the clash.
This is the result of diff doing linewise comparisons. I wonder if it
would be possible to get subversion to work at the word level (i.e.,
ignoring line breaks). This feature is available in emacs where one
can do ediff between two regions in wordwise mode (see ediff-regions-
wordwise command vs ediff-regions-linewise). I think it would be nice
if subversion realised that lines above a certain length are difficult
to compare visually, and went into a wordwise mode to help spot the
differences.
Many thanks.
Riccardo
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Re: Feature Request: wordwise diff
Posted by Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@red-bean.com>.
Are you aware that svn can use any 3rd-party external differencing
tool? A lot of tools out there know how to do word-differencing.
On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Riccardo Poli <Pr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've recently written a book with two colleagues (CCed) using
> subversion as our revision control system (our sources were Latex,
> Bibtex and postscript/pdf files). (Incidentally, the book is freely
> available on the internet from http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/)
>
> Subversion was wonderful, but we found one significant problem. One of
> us was using an editor which would keep an entire paragraph as a
> single very long line of text. This meant that a clash, say caused by
> a very small change in the paragraph, would result in subversion
> reporting a difference in a large chunck of text without any
> indication of exactly which bit of the text had caused the clash.
>
> This is the result of diff doing linewise comparisons. I wonder if it
> would be possible to get subversion to work at the word level (i.e.,
> ignoring line breaks). This feature is available in emacs where one
> can do ediff between two regions in wordwise mode (see ediff-regions-
> wordwise command vs ediff-regions-linewise). I think it would be nice
> if subversion realised that lines above a certain length are difficult
> to compare visually, and went into a wordwise mode to help spot the
> differences.
>
> Many thanks.
>
> Riccardo
>
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
>
>
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