<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>git/Documentation/diff-options.txt, branch v2.12.2</title>
<subtitle>Mirror of https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
</subtitle>
<id>https://git.shady.money/git/atom?h=v2.12.2</id>
<link rel='self' href='https://git.shady.money/git/atom?h=v2.12.2'/>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/'/>
<updated>2017-01-23T23:59:23Z</updated>
<entry>
<title>Merge branch 'rh/diff-orderfile-doc'</title>
<updated>2017-01-23T23:59:23Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Junio C Hamano</name>
<email>gitster@pobox.com</email>
</author>
<published>2017-01-23T23:59:23Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=831bd5e775ad5225f2a98eba738f69148cd50e0a'/>
<id>urn:sha1:831bd5e775ad5225f2a98eba738f69148cd50e0a</id>
<content type='text'>
Documentation fix.

* rh/diff-orderfile-doc:
  diff: document the format of the -O (diff.orderFile) file
  diff: document behavior of relative diff.orderFile
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>diff: document the format of the -O (diff.orderFile) file</title>
<updated>2017-01-16T00:42:16Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Richard Hansen</name>
<email>hansenr@google.com</email>
</author>
<published>2017-01-15T22:16:31Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=874444b70451879d5b9b7e288e5c4e711c4a87ac'/>
<id>urn:sha1:874444b70451879d5b9b7e288e5c4e711c4a87ac</id>
<content type='text'>
Signed-off-by: Richard Hansen &lt;hansenr@google.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>diff: add interhunk context config option</title>
<updated>2017-01-12T20:55:43Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Vegard Nossum</name>
<email>vegard.nossum@oracle.com</email>
</author>
<published>2017-01-12T12:21:11Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=c488867793dc9b273c1d35746452d44afcd3d7f5'/>
<id>urn:sha1:c488867793dc9b273c1d35746452d44afcd3d7f5</id>
<content type='text'>
The --inter-hunk-context= option was added in commit 6d0e674a5754
("diff: add option to show context between close hunks"). This patch
allows configuring a default for this option.

Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum &lt;vegard.nossum@oracle.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Merge branch 'nd/ita-empty-commit'</title>
<updated>2016-10-27T21:58:50Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Junio C Hamano</name>
<email>gitster@pobox.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-27T21:58:50Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=650360210afbd585f33ed622d3e700b1941b1ddb'/>
<id>urn:sha1:650360210afbd585f33ed622d3e700b1941b1ddb</id>
<content type='text'>
When new paths were added by "git add -N" to the index, it was
enough to circumvent the check by "git commit" to refrain from
making an empty commit without "--allow-empty".  The same logic
prevented "git status" to show such a path as "new file" in the
"Changes not staged for commit" section.

* nd/ita-empty-commit:
  commit: don't be fooled by ita entries when creating initial commit
  commit: fix empty commit creation when there's no changes but ita entries
  diff: add --ita-[in]visible-in-index
  diff-lib: allow ita entries treated as "not yet exist in index"
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Merge branch 'jc/ws-error-highlight'</title>
<updated>2016-10-26T20:14:43Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Junio C Hamano</name>
<email>gitster@pobox.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-26T20:14:43Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=e5272d304af3528163cd5faa822f88086448ae57'/>
<id>urn:sha1:e5272d304af3528163cd5faa822f88086448ae57</id>
<content type='text'>
"git diff/log --ws-error-highlight=&lt;kind&gt;" lacked the corresponding
configuration variable to set it by default.

* jc/ws-error-highlight:
  diff: introduce diff.wsErrorHighlight option
  diff.c: move ws-error-highlight parsing helpers up
  diff.c: refactor parse_ws_error_highlight()
  t4015: split out the "setup" part of ws-error-highlight test
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>diff: add --ita-[in]visible-in-index</title>
<updated>2016-10-24T17:47:51Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy</name>
<email>pclouds@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-24T10:42:20Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=b42b45191950a4ac39f6f5ae042c15ad114da79b'/>
<id>urn:sha1:b42b45191950a4ac39f6f5ae042c15ad114da79b</id>
<content type='text'>
The option --ita-invisible-in-index exposes the "ita_invisible_in_index"
diff flag to outside to allow easier experimentation with this new mode.
The "plan" is to make --ita-invisible-in-index default to keep consistent
behavior with 'status' and 'commit', but a bunch other commands like
'apply', 'merge', 'reset'.... need to be taken into consideration as well.

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy &lt;pclouds@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>diff: introduce diff.wsErrorHighlight option</title>
<updated>2016-10-04T22:49:05Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Junio C Hamano</name>
<email>gitster@pobox.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-04T22:26:27Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=a17505f262b62e429bb0e188c5ed73ac749e25b8'/>
<id>urn:sha1:a17505f262b62e429bb0e188c5ed73ac749e25b8</id>
<content type='text'>
With the preparatory steps, it has become trivial to teach the
system a new diff.wsErrorHighlight configuration that gives the
default value for --ws-error-highlight command line option.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Merge branch 'mh/diff-indent-heuristic'</title>
<updated>2016-09-26T23:09:16Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Junio C Hamano</name>
<email>gitster@pobox.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-09-26T23:09:16Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=b7af6ae5cff8439fdf5b72f926cab2e614906af3'/>
<id>urn:sha1:b7af6ae5cff8439fdf5b72f926cab2e614906af3</id>
<content type='text'>
Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting
which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted
intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section
are the same.  A command line option is added to help with the
experiment to find a good heuristics.

* mh/diff-indent-heuristic:
  blame: honor the diff heuristic options and config
  parse-options: add parse_opt_unknown_cb()
  diff: improve positioning of add/delete blocks in diffs
  xdl_change_compact(): introduce the concept of a change group
  recs_match(): take two xrecord_t pointers as arguments
  is_blank_line(): take a single xrecord_t as argument
  xdl_change_compact(): only use heuristic if group can't be matched
  xdl_change_compact(): fix compaction heuristic to adjust ixo
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>blame: honor the diff heuristic options and config</title>
<updated>2016-09-19T17:25:11Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Michael Haggerty</name>
<email>mhagger@alum.mit.edu</email>
</author>
<published>2016-09-05T09:44:53Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=5b162879e93dab3b4bcd66afdbea3a96660abd7d'/>
<id>urn:sha1:5b162879e93dab3b4bcd66afdbea3a96660abd7d</id>
<content type='text'>
Teach "git blame" and "git annotate" the --compaction-heuristic and
--indent-heuristic options that are now supported by "git diff".

Also teach them to honor the `diff.compactionHeuristic` and
`diff.indentHeuristic` configuration options.

It would be conceivable to introduce separate configuration options for
"blame" and "annotate"; for example `blame.compactionHeuristic` and
`blame.indentHeuristic`. But it would be confusing to users if blame
output is inconsistent with diff output, so it makes more sense for them
to respect the same configuration.

Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty &lt;mhagger@alum.mit.edu&gt;
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>diff: improve positioning of add/delete blocks in diffs</title>
<updated>2016-09-19T17:25:11Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Michael Haggerty</name>
<email>mhagger@alum.mit.edu</email>
</author>
<published>2016-09-05T09:44:51Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.shady.money/git/commit/?id=433860f3d0beb0c6f205290bd16cda413148f098'/>
<id>urn:sha1:433860f3d0beb0c6f205290bd16cda413148f098</id>
<content type='text'>
Some groups of added/deleted lines in diffs can be slid up or down,
because lines at the edges of the group are not unique. Picking good
shifts for such groups is not a matter of correctness but definitely has
a big effect on aesthetics. For example, consider the following two
diffs. The first is what standard Git emits:

    --- a/9c572b21dd090a1e5c5bb397053bf8043ffe7fb4:git-send-email.perl
    +++ b/6dcfa306f2b67b733a7eb2d7ded1bc9987809edb:git-send-email.perl
    @@ -231,6 +231,9 @@ if (!defined $initial_reply_to &amp;&amp; $prompting) {
     }

     if (!$smtp_server) {
    +       $smtp_server = $repo-&gt;config('sendemail.smtpserver');
    +}
    +if (!$smtp_server) {
            foreach (qw( /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/lib/sendmail )) {
                    if (-x $_) {
                            $smtp_server = $_;

The following diff is equivalent, but is obviously preferable from an
aesthetic point of view:

    --- a/9c572b21dd090a1e5c5bb397053bf8043ffe7fb4:git-send-email.perl
    +++ b/6dcfa306f2b67b733a7eb2d7ded1bc9987809edb:git-send-email.perl
    @@ -230,6 +230,9 @@ if (!defined $initial_reply_to &amp;&amp; $prompting) {
            $initial_reply_to =~ s/(^\s+|\s+$)//g;
     }

    +if (!$smtp_server) {
    +       $smtp_server = $repo-&gt;config('sendemail.smtpserver');
    +}
     if (!$smtp_server) {
            foreach (qw( /usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/lib/sendmail )) {
                    if (-x $_) {

This patch teaches Git to pick better positions for such "diff sliders"
using heuristics that take the positions of nearby blank lines and the
indentation of nearby lines into account.

The existing Git code basically always shifts such "sliders" as far down
in the file as possible. The only exception is when the slider can be
aligned with a group of changed lines in the other file, in which case
Git favors depicting the change as one add+delete block rather than one
add and a slightly offset delete block. This naive algorithm often
yields ugly diffs.

Commit d634d61ed6 improved the situation somewhat by preferring to
position add/delete groups to make their last line a blank line, when
that is possible. This heuristic does more good than harm, but (1) it
can only help if there are blank lines in the right places, and (2)
always picks the last blank line, even if there are others that might be
better. The end result is that it makes perhaps 1/3 as many errors as
the default Git algorithm, but that still leaves a lot of ugly diffs.

This commit implements a new and much better heuristic for picking
optimal "slider" positions using the following approach: First observe
that each hypothetical positioning of a diff slider introduces two
splits: one between the context lines preceding the group and the first
added/deleted line, and the other between the last added/deleted line
and the first line of context following it. It tries to find the
positioning that creates the least bad splits.

Splits are evaluated based only on the presence and locations of nearby
blank lines, and the indentation of lines near the split. Basically, it
prefers to introduce splits adjacent to blank lines, between lines that
are indented less, and between lines with the same level of indentation.
In more detail:

1. It measures the following characteristics of a proposed splitting
   position in a `struct split_measurement`:

   * the number of blank lines above the proposed split
   * whether the line directly after the split is blank
   * the number of blank lines following that line
   * the indentation of the nearest non-blank line above the split
   * the indentation of the line directly below the split
   * the indentation of the nearest non-blank line after that line

2. It combines the measured attributes using a bunch of
   empirically-optimized weighting factors to derive a `struct
   split_score` that measures the "badness" of splitting the text at
   that position.

3. It combines the `split_score` for the top and the bottom of the
   slider at each of its possible positions, and selects the position
   that has the best `split_score`.

I determined the initial set of weighting factors by collecting a corpus
of Git histories from 29 open-source software projects in various
programming languages. I generated many diffs from this corpus, and
determined the best positioning "by eye" for about 6600 diff sliders. I
used about half of the repositories in the corpus (corresponding to
about 2/3 of the sliders) as a training set, and optimized the weights
against this corpus using a crude automated search of the parameter
space to get the best agreement with the manually-determined values.
Then I tested the resulting heuristic against the full corpus. The
results are summarized in the following table, in column `indent-1`:

| repository            | count |      Git 2.9.0 |     compaction | compaction-fixed |       indent-1 |       indent-2 |
| --------------------- | ----- | -------------- | -------------- | ---------------- | -------------- | -------------- |
| afnetworking          |   109 |    89  (81.7%) |    37  (33.9%) |      37  (33.9%) |     2   (1.8%) |     2   (1.8%) |
| alamofire             |    30 |    18  (60.0%) |    14  (46.7%) |      15  (50.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |
| angular               |   184 |   127  (69.0%) |    39  (21.2%) |      23  (12.5%) |     5   (2.7%) |     5   (2.7%) |
| animate               |   313 |     2   (0.6%) |     2   (0.6%) |       2   (0.6%) |     2   (0.6%) |     2   (0.6%) |
| ant                   |   380 |   356  (93.7%) |   152  (40.0%) |     148  (38.9%) |    15   (3.9%) |    15   (3.9%) | *
| bugzilla              |   306 |   263  (85.9%) |   109  (35.6%) |      99  (32.4%) |    14   (4.6%) |    15   (4.9%) | *
| corefx                |   126 |    91  (72.2%) |    22  (17.5%) |      21  (16.7%) |     6   (4.8%) |     6   (4.8%) |
| couchdb               |    78 |    44  (56.4%) |    26  (33.3%) |      28  (35.9%) |     6   (7.7%) |     6   (7.7%) | *
| cpython               |   937 |   158  (16.9%) |    50   (5.3%) |      49   (5.2%) |     5   (0.5%) |     5   (0.5%) | *
| discourse             |   160 |    95  (59.4%) |    42  (26.2%) |      36  (22.5%) |    18  (11.2%) |    13   (8.1%) |
| docker                |   307 |   194  (63.2%) |   198  (64.5%) |     253  (82.4%) |     8   (2.6%) |     8   (2.6%) | *
| electron              |   163 |   132  (81.0%) |    38  (23.3%) |      39  (23.9%) |     6   (3.7%) |     6   (3.7%) |
| git                   |   536 |   470  (87.7%) |    73  (13.6%) |      78  (14.6%) |    16   (3.0%) |    16   (3.0%) | *
| gitflow               |   127 |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |       0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |
| ionic                 |   133 |    89  (66.9%) |    29  (21.8%) |      38  (28.6%) |     1   (0.8%) |     1   (0.8%) |
| ipython               |   482 |   362  (75.1%) |   167  (34.6%) |     169  (35.1%) |    11   (2.3%) |    11   (2.3%) | *
| junit                 |   161 |   147  (91.3%) |    67  (41.6%) |      66  (41.0%) |     1   (0.6%) |     1   (0.6%) | *
| lighttable            |    15 |     5  (33.3%) |     0   (0.0%) |       2  (13.3%) |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |
| magit                 |    88 |    75  (85.2%) |    11  (12.5%) |       9  (10.2%) |     1   (1.1%) |     0   (0.0%) |
| neural-style          |    28 |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |       0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |
| nodejs                |   781 |   649  (83.1%) |   118  (15.1%) |     111  (14.2%) |     4   (0.5%) |     5   (0.6%) | *
| phpmyadmin            |   491 |   481  (98.0%) |    75  (15.3%) |      48   (9.8%) |     2   (0.4%) |     2   (0.4%) | *
| react-native          |   168 |   130  (77.4%) |    79  (47.0%) |      81  (48.2%) |     0   (0.0%) |     0   (0.0%) |
| rust                  |   171 |   128  (74.9%) |    30  (17.5%) |      27  (15.8%) |    16   (9.4%) |    14   (8.2%) |
| spark                 |   186 |   149  (80.1%) |    52  (28.0%) |      52  (28.0%) |     2   (1.1%) |     2   (1.1%) |
| tensorflow            |   115 |    66  (57.4%) |    48  (41.7%) |      48  (41.7%) |     5   (4.3%) |     5   (4.3%) |
| test-more             |    19 |    15  (78.9%) |     2  (10.5%) |       2  (10.5%) |     1   (5.3%) |     1   (5.3%) | *
| test-unit             |    51 |    34  (66.7%) |    14  (27.5%) |       8  (15.7%) |     2   (3.9%) |     2   (3.9%) | *
| xmonad                |    23 |    22  (95.7%) |     2   (8.7%) |       2   (8.7%) |     1   (4.3%) |     1   (4.3%) | *
| --------------------- | ----- | -------------- | -------------- | ---------------- | -------------- | -------------- |
| totals                |  6668 |  4391  (65.9%) |  1496  (22.4%) |    1491  (22.4%) |   150   (2.2%) |   144   (2.2%) |
| totals (training set) |  4552 |  3195  (70.2%) |  1053  (23.1%) |    1061  (23.3%) |    86   (1.9%) |    88   (1.9%) |
| totals (test set)     |  2116 |  1196  (56.5%) |   443  (20.9%) |     430  (20.3%) |    64   (3.0%) |    56   (2.6%) |

In this table, the numbers are the count and percentage of human-rated
sliders that the corresponding algorithm got *wrong*. The columns are

* "repository" - the name of the repository used. I used the diffs
  between successive non-merge commits on the HEAD branch of the
  corresponding repository.

* "count" - the number of sliders that were human-rated. I chose most,
  but not all, sliders to rate from those among which the various
  algorithms gave different answers.

* "Git 2.9.0" - the default algorithm used by `git diff` in Git 2.9.0.

* "compaction" - the heuristic used by `git diff --compaction-heuristic`
  in Git 2.9.0.

* "compaction-fixed" - the heuristic used by `git diff
  --compaction-heuristic` after the fixes from earlier in this patch
  series. Note that the results are not dramatically different than
  those for "compaction". Both produce non-ideal diffs only about 1/3 as
  often as the default `git diff`.

* "indent-1" - the new `--indent-heuristic` algorithm, using the first
  set of weighting factors, determined as described above.

* "indent-2" - the new `--indent-heuristic` algorithm, using the final
  set of weighting factors, determined as described below.

* `*` - indicates that repo was part of training set used to determine
  the first set of weighting factors.

The fact that the heuristic performed nearly as well on the test set as
on the training set in column "indent-1" is a good indication that the
heuristic was not over-trained. Given that fact, I ran a second round of
optimization, using the entire corpus as the training set. The resulting
set of weights gave the results in column "indent-2". These are the
weights included in this patch.

The final result gives consistently and significantly better results
across the whole corpus than either `git diff` or `git diff
--compaction-heuristic`. It makes only about 1/30 as many errors as the
former and about 1/10 as many errors as the latter. (And a good fraction
of the remaining errors are for diffs that involve weirdly-formatted
code, sometimes apparently machine-generated.)

The tools that were used to do this optimization and analysis, along
with the human-generated data values, are recorded in a separate project
[1].

This patch adds a new command-line option `--indent-heuristic`, and a
new configuration setting `diff.indentHeuristic`, that activate this
heuristic. This interface is only meant for testing purposes, and should
be finalized before including this change in any release.

[1] https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider-tools

Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty &lt;mhagger@alum.mit.edu&gt;
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano &lt;gitster@pobox.com&gt;
</content>
</entry>
</feed>
