Subject: Re: [offtopic?] xdelta patch format wrapper

From: Martin Langhoff <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:46:56 +1300

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> I am lost as to your objective because you seem to be keeping a
> whole LOT more than I would have imagined for a specialized
> purpose file format.

My source files are 2 zipfiles that I know contain 1 xml file, and then
may contain any arbitrary files. As a specialised file format is a
pretty general case ;-) Because of compression, xdeltas of the zipfiles
aren't good. So what I want to do is to diff the 2 unzipped directories
- nothing git-specific, I could use diff -urN.

Git diff *is* better in that it handles binary files, but we pay a
sizable cost in being reversible.

So I am thinking of doing is writing a wrapper that does the equivalent
of the "urN" flags to diff, but uses xdelta as the diffing algorithm.

As my case is rather general I suspect I'm better off biting the bullet
and writing something generally useful - it doesn't take that much more
effort and if it ends up being popular, I'll have some help with its
maintenance ;-)

In other words, I'm trolling for peer review to make sure the tool is
sane, and will be useful to others ;-)

> If you want to reuse that much of git

I don't think I'll use *any* git code at all for the time being. If it
was trivial to produce a statically compiled git-diff.exe and
git-apply-patch.exe that work without funny dependencies on any windows
box then I would. Don't think any of the windows ports of git are there
(even though they are excellent!).

cheers,

m
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