Re: [Docutils-develop] rstdiff

[Stefan M. <sm...@oe...>]

Hi!

3 months (98 days) ago Stefan Merten wrote:
> Lately my urge to have `rstdiff` got so big that I started
> doing something about it.
> 
> The idea for `rstdiff` is to take two versions of a reST document and
> outputs something where the differences are marked up. So far I think
> about putting special classes like `inserted` / `replaced` /
> `replacement` / `deleted` on blocks and putting special roles of the
> same name on inline spans of changes.
> 
> As far as the "something" is concerned it would probably be a writer.
[...]
> In any case my studies so far are in the sandbox at
> 
> 	sandbox/rstdiff
> 
> Comments and ideas are welcome.

Meanwhile there is some code there which already copes with many
things. It's not perfect yet but for many cases it produces very
useful output.

One problem I had to solve was that I wanted to be flexible with the
writer. This is somewhat difficult because the normal setup routines
expect the writer to be fixed. So I pre-parsed the command line
looking for the writer parameter and using it for the setup routines.

Well, I'm writing for two reasons. One reason is to announce
availability of `rstdiff`.

The other reason is that I'd like to ask for advice on how to make
this installable. I'm sorry but I have no experience on how this is
done in Python. Any help is appreciated. One problem to note is that
at the moment it consists of a script (`rstdiff.py`) and a small
library (`treediff`) supplying a general method for diffing trees.

@David: Is it thinkable that `rstdiff` could be included in the main
distribution at some point? I think it's a very useful approach and
maybe at some point it could even be included in things like MoinMoin
or Plone to present highly readable diffs between versions.


						Grüße

						Stefan