[darcs-devel] New Patch Format sticky spots

[Jason Dagit]

I found some time tonight to start implementing a different format for
hunks.  Very simple but meant to allow skipping over data.

hunk <filename> <line#> <#bytes of old content> <#bytes new content>
<dump of old lines><dump of new lines>


There are two problems that come up almost immediately with this
format (I think).

1) How many bytes do line endings add to the length of the old or new
content?  Is it okay to assume line endings are exactly one byte in
patches?  I know this will hold in unix-land, but what about win32?

2) Currently when using darcs interactively (in darcs record for
example) what you see on the screen is a dump of what goes into the
patch file.  So the direct result of my new patch format is that the
patch goes from being easily readable by humans to a bunch of garbage
all lumped together.

I'm looking for suggestions on how we should solve these problems. 
I'd be happy to share what I have, but I warn you that the code is
hackish at the moment because I'm just prototyping and trying to
figure out what changes would really be needed to get this working. 
On the positive side, with my new format I only fail two of the test
scripts and both of them assume a very specific hunk format.  I also
have not done any benchmarking to see if performance is better with
the new format, but I think it will definitely lend itself to better
performance.

Thanks,
Jason