Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Displaying diffs

[Steve W. <sw...@wc...>]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Jeff Dairiki wrote:

> >Yes and yes, and it's an idea I've played with (in my head at least).
> >Doing it by diffs is somewhat awkward though... what would be cool is to
> >store the pages in a format that preserves the change information somehow.
> >Outside of XML though, I haven't had any ideas how to preserve this info.
> 
> A very interesting idea!  In the database, tag each line with which version
> number in which it originally appeared.  Then a display similar to (but
> hopefully far less cluttered than) the 'annotated' source view produced by
> the SF CVS  browser could then be produced.  (I.e. "recent" additions or 
> changes could be highlighted, and perhaps annotated with the author's name.)
> (My guess is that deleted text would not be shown in this display.)
> 
> An example of SF CVS 'annotated' source can be found at:
>   http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/phpwiki/lib/editpage.php?annota
> te=1.15&cvsroot=phpwiki
> 
> Another, simpler, option which has been in the back of my head for a while
> now, is just to fix things so that the diff output gets transform.php'ed.
> Then one can create a "unified diff" (with infinite context) which will be
> the transformed page with changes since the last version highlit.
> (One VersionHistory is added, changes since any particular archived version,
> could be highlit.)

To further this discussion... here's another approach. The idea came from
two places: reading about Xanadu, and looking at the diffs on Sourceforge
this way:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/phpwiki/lib/config.php.diff?cvsroot=phpwiki&r1=text&tr1=1.20&r2=text&tr2=1.21&f=h

Rather than trying to cram all the information in a single page, display
the two versions side by side. Highlight the differences. Also, the Unix
tool sdiff does this and can be very userful at times. (I think Emacs'
"Emerge" mode does this too). This has been one of the clearest ways I've
seen to view page differences.


> Also, I'm happy to report that Sandra (my wife), Lucy (my dog) and I (along
> with most of the rest of Seattle) seem to have survived yesterday's rather
> large earthquake in fine shape.

Good to hear! For some reason I thought you lived in CA. All I really knew
though was that you lived in PST somewhere :-)

~swain


...............................ooo0000ooo.................................
   Hear FM quality freeform radio through the Internet: http://wcsb.org/
                     home page: www.wcsb.org/~swain