Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] Support diff.wordDiff config

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:03:53 -0800

Karthik Nayak <[email-masked]> writes:

> This patch series adds the diff.wordDiff config option. This mimics the
> '--word-diff' option of `git-diff(1)`.

Is it even be sensible to introduce this configuration variable in
the first place?  What would this do to users who set this variable
and use third-party or their own scripts that run "git diff" under
the hood?

The usual answer is "these tools should be using the low-level
plumbing commands like diff-files, diff-index, and diff-tree", so I
am not worried about it too much myself, and the above is purely the
devil's advocate comment.

Having said that, running

	$ git grep -e 'git diff '

in the collection of scripts I use [*] to work on this project, I am
reminded that I may have to be a bit more conservative than I
currently am about the risk of breaking scripts with the changes
like the one being proposed.

The proposed feature also may break those who use the git-prompt and
diff-highlight available in conrib/, even though I am not sure how
badly they would break, because I only looked at the lines given by
this command:

	$ git grep -e 'git diff ' -- \*.sh ':!t/'

and didn't check how the output from 'git diff' is used.

[Footnote]

 * They can be seen in the 'todo' branch, if anybody is interested.