Re: [Texmacs-dev] version diffs

[david]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:59:46PM -0600, Joris Van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> Apparently, someone automatically generates diffs for
> the successive TeXmacs distributions:
> 
>       
> http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/sorcerer/xdelta.downgrade/TeXmacs/

However those files are useless to the human reader: they are created
by xdelta, and according to the xdelta manual page.

       Xdelta provides the ability to generate deltas between a pair
       of files and later apply those deltas. It operates similar to
       the diff and patch commands, but works on binary files and does
       not produce a human readable output.

That is useful to perform space-savyy incremental updates (or backups)
but not to the human reader.

Additionally, TeXmacs has a some ugliness which makes naive automatic
diffs rather useless:

  The TEXMACS_PATH directory in the source distribution is renamed
  which each release. That produces massive amounts of non-pertinent
  diff output.

  Several files include a hard-coded version number, that produce a
  lot of noise in the diff if that part of the upgrade is not done
  prior to diffing.

As part of my routine of checking how patches are applied and what
changes in new version of TeXmacs I have created some useful tools to
ease the creation of meaningful diffs for TeXmacs. If some people are
interested in that, I would welcome their help to put that tools (and
the documentation I routinely produce for my own needs) in a
releasable state. Unfortunately I am very busy trying to find time to
actually improve the code and the Management told me not to spend more
time than strictly necessary on changelogs.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.