Re: [PATCH v6 00/21] Add range-diff, a tbdiff lookalike

On 08/13, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Aug 2018, Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

The incredibly useful git-tbdiff [https://github.com/trast/tbdiff] tool to
compare patch series (say, to see what changed between two iterations sent
to the Git mailing list) is slightly less useful for this developer due to
the fact that it requires the hungarian and numpy Python packages which are
for some reason really hard to build in MSYS2. So hard that I even had to
give up, because it was simply easier to re-implement the whole shebang as a
builtin command.

The project at https://github.com/trast/tbdiff seems to be dormant, anyway.
Funny (and true) story: I looked at the open Pull Requests to see how active
that project is, only to find to my surprise that I had submitted one in
August 2015, and that it was still unanswered let alone merged.

While at it, I forward-ported AEvar's patch to force --decorate=no because 
git -p tbdiff would fail otherwise.

Side note: I work on implementing range-diff not only to make life easier
for reviewers who have to suffer through v2, v3, ... of my patch series, but
also to verify my changes before submitting a new iteration. And also, maybe
even more importantly, I plan to use it to verify my merging-rebases of Git
for Windows (for which I previously used to redirect the
pre-rebase/post-rebase diffs vs upstream and then compare them using git
diff --no-index). And of course any interested person can see what changes
were necessary e.g. in the merging-rebase of Git for Windows onto v2.17.0 by
running a command like:

        base=^{/Start.the.merging-rebase}
        tag=v2.17.0.windows.1
        pre=$tag$base^2
        git range-diff $pre$base..$pre $tag$base..$tag

The command uses what it calls the "dual color mode" (can be disabled via 
--no-dual-color) which helps identifying what actually changed: it prefixes
lines with a - (and red background) that correspond to the first commit
range, and with a + (and green background) that correspond to the second
range. The rest of the lines will be colored according to the original
diffs.

Changes since v5:

- Fixed the bug (introduced in v5) where a dashdash would not be handled
  appropriately.

Thanks!  I've read through all the patches (and the range-diff :))
again and played around a bit with the newest version, and I think
this is ready for 'next'.

While playing around with it I did find one error message that reads
slightly odd, but it's still understandable, so I'm not sure it's
worth worrying about now (we can always improve it on top):

     $ ./git range-diff -- js/range-diff-v4...HEADt
    fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEADt..js/range-diff-v4': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
    Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
    'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
    error: could not parse log for 'HEADt..js/range-diff-v4'

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