buggy textfilter skips valid changes

[Martin Renold <martinxyz gmx ch>]

hi,

First of all, meld is a great tool and I use it in my daily development
workflow, to clean up my changes before committing them. I run "meld -a ."
(got an alias for that) and use Ctrl-D or the scroll-wheel on the center
strip (nice feature!) and Ctrl-W to walk through all files and changes.

I want to be able to trust meld 100% not to "forget" to show me a change.
Currently, meld skips over all line removals hunks (except the last one):
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505087

This is related to the "ignore changes which insert or delete blank lines"
preference, which you can't turn off (the GUI suggests you can, but it
doesn't work).

> ------- Comment #12 from Kai Willadsen  2009-02-28 14:56 UTC -------
> So this patch works for me in so far as it fixes these bugs.
> 
> Speaking more generally, I suspect that the way that the 'Ignore blank lines'
> preference works means that it's never going to function quite as desired. 
> [...]
> 
> I think the only way to fix this properly is to improve Meld's text filtering
> so that we can have filters that change the number of lines in the diff, at
> which point 'Ignore blank lines' becomes just another text filter.

That might be the best solution, but nobody is working on that, right? 

Personally I'm not interested on working on that neither because I don't use
text filtering at all. I'm only interested in getting rid of the problems
that this is causing to users who have never even enabled those features.

I can also make you a patch that removes textfiltering completely from meld
if you want, but I guess some users are actually using it...?

bye,
Martin