My day/week/month is made!

Julian Foad said:

"Your BRANCH-README file <http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/branches/invoke-diff-cmd-feature/BRANCH-README> is a fantastic window into the branch, much more detailed and helpful than the rest of us ever write. I can easily see exactly what the whole feature does, how it's structured, and what your plans are, without having been paying close attention. I'm mentioning this mainly so anybody else contemplating taking a look at this knows this is a good place to start reading. And I'm pleased to see you have taken care to adhere to our coding style. "

It's the most wonderful compliment I've heard in years :)

{And, to be honest, writing this BRANCH-README helped me a lot in getting things done and keep me focused on what I was (and am) trying to do.  It was danielsh who suggested that I should write one (ironically I initially omitted it, despite fixing a part of the hacking guide entry for this most excellent advice.)}

Don't delay, write _your_ BRANCH-README today!

Life Pro Tip: svn up regularly!

I was fiddling with the --internal-diff command and when testing, svn coredumped on me.   So,  I removed my recent changes leaving the original patch I'm working on in place and... it still coredumped. 

OMG,  what did I break?  And how?  Because nothing I did should have caused this...

Just for luck, I decided to compile the original version, and the bug was there all the time.  Phew, I'm innocent(just this once...)

So, I post the fix to the dev list and --- Ben already found and patched the issue 2 weeks ago.

Note to self:

 before you do anything!

If at first you don't succeed...

I tidied up the "comments" which are actually defines (what was I thinking?) in this file because, well, they looked messy :)

However, in this case, the position of the defines actually reflected the structure of the data -- something I have never seen before, but it's indeed very handy, once you know what you're looking at.

So, the patch then morphed from 'fixing' what was not broken to adding information about what is going on :)

Since we didn't want Doxygen to pick up that comment since it's only useful when you view the code, I used a /* plain comment */ here.

A Map of the Diff Problem

was gifted to me yesterday by Julian Foad, and curiously so,  it is making the difficult much easier by making it really big :)

Actually, none of those things are 'difficult' as such --- what made it hard was that I had no idea of the true dimension of the problem.  And so...:

Diff is difficult.

After much staring, stepping and grepping, I finally produced a solution for the partial problem defined in (Issue 2074, "--extensions '' doesn't work.) which is part of (Issue 2044, Fully customizable external diff invocations).

It's not bad(it works for very small values of functional), but also not very good, since it is rather agricultural and I'm not sure how to handle deprecation, but, it's a start.

However it only deals with one part of the problem and not with the issue of giving the user a wormhole to call any diff function they want to use, however they want to.

To be continued... ;-)

Just another lazy Sunday

Today is dedicated to reading all about svn properties, and because it's cold and I want a fire, I'm in the garden, cooking pound chicken on the grill, copying this gentleman's excellent example:

The svn dev mailing list is a lot of fun at the moment, the [RFC] Build System Documentation discussion yields a lot of surprises, some neat puzzles and many 'aha!' experiences, and I'm learning a lot :)