Re: cvs rdiff -B feature

[Derek R. Price]

karl@gnu.org wrote:

> Enclosed is a patch that implements a new option -B to rdiff.  This
> tells it not to output the contents of binary files, only the headers.
> This is useful because diffs of arbitrary binary files cannot be parsed
> by other tools.
>
> In particular, I wrote a tool to show the history of changes made on a
> branch since a given date, which uses rdiff.  (I'm happy to share the
> tool if anyone wants it.)  It needs -B to get the right output.
>
> It's also necessary to always get the time of the second file in the
> diff, so the right time can be shown for removed files.
>
> I posted this before, for 1.11, but apparently it never made it into the
> sources.  Hope you'll accept it.

Why isn't --brief (um, maybe only `-s' for rdiff) mode sufficient for this 
purpose?  And if
the parser is your own tool, why not tell it to ignore the binary diff lines or 
run the file
through sed and remove the lines before passing the data to your tool?

Derek

--
Derek Price                      CVS Solutions Architect ( http://CVSHome.org )
mailto:dprice@collab.net         CollabNet ( http://collab.net )
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