[Monotone-devel] Quick poll: Does anybody actually still use diff with --external?

[Thomas Keller]

I'm working on issue 102 and to make this work properly I want to create
the diff output and return it instead of just printing it to stdout
directly. Problem is that the external diff hook calls execute("diff",
"-u", ...) and I wonder if I should go through the hassle and use
spawn_redirected to catch and return the output from there.

One of the main problems is that we have no spawn_redirected
implementation on win32 yet, so --external will fail there. On the other
hand I wonder how many people actually use --external nowadays, given
the fact that we haven't heard many complaints that the internal diff
algorithm produces wrong results compared to diff(1).

Another problem with --external is that its currently also only
available in diff, but not automate content_diff, for much of the same
reason that the diff command plainly prints out the created diff, so
there is this minor incompleteness between both commands.

So, is this a must-have feature or do you think this could be removed
(and simplify and fasten the code at the same time)?

Thomas.

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