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

[Stephen Leake]

Thomas Keller <address@hidden> writes:

> 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)?

I don't use 'mtn diff --external'. When I want to run an external diff,
I just fetch the file text from mtn, then run diff.

So I think it could be removed (after 1.0?).

-- 
-- Stephe