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Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2013 13:23:15 +0100
From: Stefan Sperling <stsp@elego.de>
To: Branko =?utf-8?B?xIxpYmVq?= <brane@wandisco.com>
Cc: users@subversion.apache.org
Subject: 2-params diff (was: Re: FreeBSD project and subversion.)
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On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 12:41:05PM +0100, Branko Čibej wrote:
> One other option would be, as was noted elsewhere in this thread, to
> invent a new subcommand for tree comparisons, keeping only the
> historical differences feature in "svn diff".
> 
> That would solve the ambiguity, but it would (a) break backward
> compatibility, and (b) invent yet another subcommand, which we don't like.

I don't think we need to change how 'svn diff' works. A new subcommand
could simply provide nicer syntax than 'svn diff' for some use cases.
We can keep 'svn diff' working as it is.

I don't think we should ever change how 'svn diff URL1 URL2' and
'svn diff WC-PATH1 WC-PATH2' work.

But a new subcommand could behave differently in the 'WC-PATH1 WC-PATH2'
case, and compare WC-PATH1 to WC-PATH2. It would essentially be an
alias for 'diff --old --new'. It may need to overlap a lot with 'svn diff',
for options such as --summarize perhaps, and all the little options that
control little aspects of the diff (--ignore-properties,
--show-copies-as-adds, etc).  Would it be worth adding? Not sure.

> Yet another option would be to introduce a new option, so instead of using
> 
>     svn diff --old A --new B
> 
> you'd get
> 
>     svn diff --compare A B
> 
> to generate a diff between the two targets, and plain
> 
>     svn diff A B
> 
> to get the historical diff of each target.

I don't think adding a new option to 'svn diff' would help at all.
The point is to unclutter the user interface by providing a more
straightforward way of comparing two paths/URLs with each other.
Another option (especially one that overlaps with functionality provided by
existing --old and --new options) would make the UI even more complicated
than it already is.