Are revlog diff calculated as "text" ALWAYS?

[Kastner Masilko, Friedrich]

> From: mercurial-bounces at selenic.com [mailto:mercurial-bounces at selenic.com] On Behalf Of Jesus Cea
> 
> You don't want fixed size chunks (unless your source files are database
> files). Any insertion in the middle of the file will change all blocks
> after it.
> 
> You want to find a suitable "linefeed" mark that doesn't change a lot
> when you do small changes to the file. For instance, for XML files, the
> "line ending" could be the character ">".
> 
> I wonder if bdiff implementation demands a sequence of "lines"/blocks
> as input, or could manage whole file blocks, like "xdelta"
> <http://xdelta.org/>.
> 
> Another issue would be when to use current diff or binary diff. Current
> implementation detects "binary" when byte '\0' is present in the input,
> but the described XML doesn't qualify. Maybe something like "'\0'
> present or 'size/number of linefeeds' exceeds a threshold". But sounds
> quite magical to me.
> 
> An additional option would be to do real binary XDELTA-like diff
> ALWAYS, but then I wonder how this would interact with "hg diff" when
> the file is actually text.

It is clear that my proposal is _not_ the generic solution to all those problems resulting from the used line-based algorithm. But it would ease the described situation somewhat, without cutting too much into performance or usage. Let's see if a patch gets some positive reviews...



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