Re: [PATCH 4/4] range-diff: indent special lines as context

Hi Stefan,

On Mon, 13 Aug 2018, Stefan Beller wrote:

quoted

quoted

The later lines that indicate a change to the Makefile will be treated as
context both in the outer and inner diff, such that those lines stay
regular color.

While I am a fan of having those lines colored correctly, I have to admit
that I am not exactly enthusiastic about that extra indentation...

Otherwise, this looks good to me.

Can you explain what makes you less enthused about the indentation?

Advantage:
* allows easy coloring (easy implementation)
Disadvantage:
* formats change,

This is it. It breaks my visual flow.

but the range diff is still in its early design phase, so we're not
breaking things, yet?

Indeed. We're not breaking things. If you feel strongly about it, we can
have that indentation, I *can* get used to it.

  (Do we ever plan on sending range-diff patches that can be applied to
  rewrite history? I am very uncertain on such a feature request.  It
  sounds cool, though)

I remember that I heard you discussing this internally. I am not too big a
fan of this idea, I have to admit. The range diff seems more designed to
explain how a patch series evolved, rather than providing machine-readable
data that allows to recreate said evolution. For example, the committer
information as well as the date are missing, which would preclude a
faithful reconstruction.

And that is not all: if you wanted to "apply" a range diff, you would need
to know more about the base(s) of the two commit ranges. You would need to
know that they are at least very similar to the base onto which you want
to apply this.

And quite seriously, this would be the wrong way to go in my mind. We have
a very efficient data format to transport all of that information: the Git
bundle.

Let's not overload the range diff format with multiple, partially
contradicting purposes. Think "separation of concerns". It's the same
issue, really, as trying to send highly structured data such as bug
reports or code contributions via a medium meant to send unstructured
plain or formatted text back and forth between human beings.

Ciao,
Dscho