[wdiff-bugs] diff as input

[Martin von Gagern]

Hi!

There are a lot of tools out there which produce (unified) diff as
output. Examples are most revision control tools, like cvs, svn, hg,
git, bzr, as well as other tools like quilt. There are cases where I
would want to look at the changes using wdiff. Therefore I propose the
introduction of a new flag, "-u", telling wdiff that the input is in
unified diff format.

wdiff could then create temporary files, copying lines starting with '-'
only to the left one, those starting with '+' only to the right one, and
all other lines to both. The first character should be stripped if it is
'-', '+' or ' ' but probably kept if it is '@'. Then the normal
operation could process those two input files.

The result would of course not be the same as a wdiff of the whole
original input files, as the unified diff contains only a limited amount
of context information. Instead, the @@ lines separating hunks would
still be visible, as would be the details about the files compared.
wdiff would operate on those informations as well, which I would
consider intended behaviour, but I'm not really sure.

Any opinions on this before I start coding?

Greetings,
 Martin von Gagern

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