[darcs-users] locking

[Ketil Malde]

Max Battcher <me at worldmaker.net> writes:

> Daniel Bünzli wrote:

>> one can dream...

> Absolutely.  I know that I alone have contributed several thoughts on
> arbitrary syntax-tree diffs.  Then there is the recent talk of
> change-type "plugins".

The problem with dreams is that they are unbounded.

However - and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the current diff
simply finds the minimum edit distance (or an approximation thereof)
over the lines - that is, what is the minimal set of lines that must
be changed to go from the old text to the new one.

For LaTeX etc, line breaks are fairly arbitrary - ie. paragraphs get
rebroken all the time. Wouldn't it make sense to use the same old
diff, but over words (whitespace-separated tokens) instead of lines?

This has the advantage of being 1. simple, 2. general, and as far as I
can see: 3. quite useful in many cases.

(Apologies if this is an old hat, I've been...away)

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants