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

[CooSoft Support]

Works + spanner spring to mind with my reply :-)

Personally I couldn't care less that the au diff command doesn't have 
the --external option and I have never thought it inconsistent as one 
would only use it via some other tool like mtn-browse and if you wanted 
to use say kompare or kdiff3 then it is easy enough for something like 
mtn-browse to do that by fetching the files and doing it manually 
(mtn-browse actually does that).

However on the ordinary mtn diff command I do have --external set up to 
use kompare and that can prove very useful when comparing complex 
unchecked in changes made inside a workspace. Easily got round with a 
script though, automating what Stephen suggested, so certainly not `a 
must have'.

But I must admit I don't see the connection between the question and the 
diff sort order. Wouldn't diff be called per file so isn't it just the 
file order that needs sorting first? Also how does removing it make 
things faster?

In short - no real objections but I think it would be a pity and I can't 
see what it would gain other than simplification. Also other SCM tools 
allow for the integration of external/other comparison tools so may be a 
bit of a negative on the `features' front.

Tony.

Thomas Keller wrote:
> 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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