GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 738700
Add "Patience Diff" diff
Last modified: 2017-12-13 19:09:10 UTC
There's wonderful diff algorithms called Patience Diff [0], which is used, for example, by tool called patdiff [1]. It seems to be much more developer-friendly, so I'd like to propose to use that, either as an option or just as main algorithm (not sure what's best). Thanks! [0]: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/73318.html?nojs=1 [1]: http://neocontra.blogspot.com/2013/02/public-service-announcement-patdiff-is.html
Found a project actually doing that https://github.com/albfan/PatienceMeld (didn't try)
That project (almost) works.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether patience or Myer's diff is better, but we implement Myer's at the moment in meld.matchers. I imagine that substituting patience diff in there would be totally reasonable. I do have questions about how well patience diff works for inline highlighting. If it's not great, then we could always just use Myer's for inline highlighting even if we used patience for line-based comparisons. One final thing would be that there's no way this should be a user-selectable, so we'd have to make a call about which was actually nicer. (In reply to comment #1) > Found a project actually doing that https://github.com/albfan/PatienceMeld > (didn't try) That project just imports patience diff from bzr, so we can't actually use that. We'd probably want to reimplement it ourselves. On the upside, it's a relatively straight-forward algorithm. Anyway, I'm unlikely to get around to this, but if someone else is interested then it would make a cool project.
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