launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[James Westby <jw+debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat Sep 12 09:02:42 +0100 2009 Jonathan Lange wrote:
>  * How feasible is it to have special diffing for package branches?
> Distro folk are mostly interested only in the diff of the debian/
> directory, not in changes to the main code.

It's a bit more than this actually, though just debian/ would get you
some of the way there.

Depending on what operation we are doing we want a specific diff, because
we trust some of the changes to be "correct" (and this is usually the
large majority of the changes).

  * If it is a new upstream release then we want the interdiff between
    the old changes from upstream and the new changes from upstream.

  * If it is a merge from Debian then we want to see the interdiff
    between the old changes from Debian and the new changes from Debian,
    the new diff against Debian and the plain diff from old to new at
    different times.

These are rather specific things for packaging, but the current behaviour
of merge proposals makes them rather suboptimal for some of the things that
we do (Loading up a page with 100,000 line diff and then trying to find
the < 100 lines that we care about).

Thanks,

James