Re: extend diff3 to ignore whitespace differences - here's a patch

[John Lumby]

I suppose what I want it to do is to deterministically choose any one of the 
files (I don't care which so long as it's consistent) and print the lines 
from that file.     I realise that doesn't sound good in documentation.   So 
I would be happy to find out what my code change actually does and document 
that it is supposed to do that.

> From experiment, it appears that it always chooses "mine".   Now, I must 
admit I don't understand this, and I suppose I should do before requesting 
the change, but I don't.   My mental model of diff3 is to output lines of 
"yours" modified as appropriate by differences found between "mine" and 
"older", i.e. (as I understood it) the output is basically "yours".   In the 
example I gave, ignoring whitespace differences, there is no difference 
between "mine" and "older", so I would expect it to output "yours" 
unmodified.    Either I have it backwards, or my code change has disturbed 
the normal behaviour.     Do you know which of those it is?  (or something 
else?).    If I have it backwards and it really outputs a base of "mine" 
modified by diffs in the other two, then I'm happy to submit this as is with 
that documentation.     Otherwise maybe I should investigate and understand 
it better.    Hope you can advise.

John
----Original Message Follows----
From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
To: "John Lumby" <address@hidden>
CC: address@hidden
Subject: Re: extend diff3 to ignore whitespace differences - here's a patch
Date: 10 Dec 2003 15:19:59 -0800

I can see the general motivation, but I still don't see exactly what
you want diff3 to do in that situation.  Here we have a case where
the 3 files differ, but you want diff3 to consider them to be "the same".
In that case, what should it print?  There are 3 different possibilities
for each line.

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