Re: buggy textfilter skips valid changes

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

2009/3/7 Martin Renold <martinxyz gmx ch>:
> 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 -------
>> 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?

Not as far as I know, no.

> 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...?

Is there actually a problem with text filtering, or are you just
talking about the ignore-blank-lines preference?  From my
recollection, Meld's text filtering is completely unrelated to
ignoring blank lines. I can see how you could read my comment to
suggest that they're related, but my suggestion was actually that they
*should* be related, since the text filtering mechanism is IMO most
robust.

As for your patch to fix "Ignore blank lines", it significantly
changes the behaviour of the preference. I'm not saying that the new
behaviour is bad, just that it's different.

Personally, I don't use the preference so I'd happily commit the patch
(or a variant thereof), but given the behavioural change, I think this
requires an ACK from Stephen.

Kai