Re: [feature request] set change block size to 1 line

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 11 November 2013 02:14, Max Hutchinson <maxhutch gmail com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to be able to [optionally] set the change block length to a single
> line.  I'm trying to use meld to work with edits of text in latex with one
> sentence per line.  Unlike code, where edits on consecutive lines tend to
> relate to one another, in text consecutive edits can be semantically
> independent.

Apologies for the very late reply; I just lost this.

I can appreciate the problem, but I'm not sure what the solution would
look like.  As with most diff algorithms, in Meld 'modified' chunks
are just identified based on an insertion/deletion pair without any
actual similarity metric. While you *could* (probably) set the change
block size to one, you'd then get very poor results if you ever added
a line. For example, in the case e.g.,

a - a
_ - b
c - c'
d - d

we'd have to make an arbitrary decision about which line matched what,
and would probably end up telling you that c was a modified b and c'
was an insertion.

Anyway, feel free to file a bug. I suspect this would be a fairly
manageable change, but I'm not sure it's a thing that I'd expose in
Meld itself; to me this feels like a job for an extension.

> I looked through the archives and found this thread:
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/meld-list/2011-February/msg00017.html
> I think my request is a bit of a special case and thus avoids some of the
> complication.  I've found that diffuse is able to do this, and will use it
> in the interim, but the rest of meld is much nicer.

That thread is actually about doing splits rather than a totally
different aligning mode, and it's already in Meld 1.8, with some
fairly significant limitations.

cheers,
Kai