Re: [Monotone-devel] patch: external diff support

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

On 6/12/05, Nuno Lucas <address@hidden> wrote:
> Why not just "monotone diff --external="diff -urN" ?

The problem is that the filenames will be something like "/tmp/zq78by
/tmp/AT23pS", which is not at all useful when generating a diff/patch.
 So, you have to be able to specify a label for the file -- "diff -u
--label $realname1 $tmpfile1 --label $realname2 $tmpfile2".  You can
certainly do something like --external="diff -urN --label $1 $2
--label $3 $4", but are you really going to type that out each time?

njs's suggestion can solve that pretty elegantly, I think, as you
wouldn't have to pass --diff-args to diff at all.  You could do diff
--external --diff-args="graphical", and have your hook know that when
the extra args are "graphical", then invoke windiff, otherwise invoke
normal diff.

As far as having to never learn Lua to use monotone, I'm not sure if
that's a design goal or not (especially considering that lua takes all
of 15-20 minutes to "learn").  You can certainly use monotone without
writing a line of lua, but if you want to tweak all sorts of features,
that's what it's there for.  It's no different than having to use a
custom config file format.

Doc updates/test suite bits are coming; I wanted to make sure that
this type of argument set was the right way to go to avoid having to
rework the docs in case it wasn't :)

    - Vlad