Re: [PATCH 3/4] diff: introduce diff.<driver>.binary

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

It's possible that one could, given the binary preimage and the two
lossy textconv'd versions, produce a custom binary merge that would just
munge the tags, or just munge the text, or whatever. But that is an
order of magnitude more work than writing a textconv, which is usually
as simple as "/path/to/existing/conversion-script".

And the whole point of this exercise was to make it simple to set this
conversion up.

quoted

I'd say that format-patch should always disable textconv so that we won't
have to worry about it for now.

Agreed, if you remove "for now". I had never intended for these to be
anything but a human-readable display (and while I am generally OK with
generalizing functionality when we can, I think there is real value in
the simplicity here).

Ok.  I don't disagree with any of the above.

We however need to make it very clear that reversibility (aka ability to
produce applicable diff) is never the goal of the textconv mechanism (and
suggest your "for applicable and reviewable diff, you produce the standard
binary diff and add the textconv diff as a comment" in the documentation),
as I am quite sure that 6 months down the road somebody who was not
involved in this thread would complain.