#diffs

2025-04-02

Came up at work but definitely a question of general interest:

I feel like when looking at a line-by-line diff of an XML file, it's just...
really not super clear, even with highlighting and such. Is there any sort of graph-aware diff tool that might generate a visual graph and show the difference that way? So that rather than reviewing line by line, you can say "ah, a node has moved from being a child of this node to another", or "these two nodes have been merged into one".

I feel like it would be possible to gin something up in like, networkX or something, but if there's prior art...

#techPosting #XML #computerScienceTrees #graphs #diffs

When you start going through #objdump #diffs it may be time to question your life choices. #headscratcher

Isaac RowlandIsaacRowland
2024-02-16
2023-11-06

Here is a tip for anybody learning #Git and is confused by #merging and #rebasing

We all know git stores commits as snapshots. However, when it comes to merging and rebasing, it's better to think of commits as #diffs that introduce changes (the thing you get with git diff). You are actually combining, splitting, rearranging or deleting diffs - not snapshots.

This requires a slight change in your mental model of git. But the operations will make sense immediately.

2022-11-29

I cannot imagine living without file revisioning, like #git

Having used them daily for the previous 30 years, I don't understand how developers work without #branches, #merging, #diffs.

#visualsourcesafe #cvs #svn #hg #git it doesn't matter - it's the concept of revisioning and being and to "go back in time".

#Revisioning also for binaries, Word documents and Excels, of course. What else?

Christian Hammondchipx86@mastodon.online
2022-11-09

Continuing with #projects, let me talk for a minute about #diffx!

Did you know there's no standard file format for #diffs? No, seriously. I mean, there are Unified Diffs, but that just covers the actual line changes. There's nothing for metadata, no consistency for filename encodings, nothing. It's a mess.

So we're working to solve that with DiffX:

diffx.org/

This provides #metadata, parsing rules, mutability, binary files.

All backwards-compatible with common diff variants.

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