[darcs-users] Re: What if darcs is generating too inclusive of hunks?

[Benedikt Schmidt]

"Brian Smith" <brianlsmith at gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/9/06, Yuval Kogman <nothingmuch at woobling.org> wrote:
>
>     On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 10:30:36 -0600, Drew Vogel wrote:
>
>     > But darcs is generating a hunk that includes the code that I've shortened
>     to [... a ton of code ...] above because it finds the
>     "summarize-calls-by-interviewer" text below it. I know I should have
>     > made these changes separately, but it's a little late now :) Is there a
>     way to make darcs be less aggressive/exhaustive while it is diff'ing?
>
>
>  I have also experienced cases where darcs seems to generate patches with too
> many "false" changes.
>
> Imagine that I was holding a repository in Darcs and Subversion at the same
> time. Then, I think it is reasonable to say that, if the patches Darcs
> generates are more noisy than the ones CVS and Subversion generates, then that
> should be considered a bug in Darcs. I have never had any notable problems with
> the way that Subversion's diff works, which is why I think it is a good
> benchmark. This is analogous to the GHC performance metric (If GHC is not
> faster than everything else, then a bug should be filed).

I agree and have opened a new bug.

http://bugs.darcs.net/issue346

| darcs diff algorithm should find nicer diffs
|
| Please attach all examples for this behaviour with a small explanation of
| the desired output or the diff produced by other SCMs to this bug.

Since improved heuristics in the diff algorithm/diff postprocessing can't
handle all cases, any ideas what a hunk editor should look like?

Benedikt