Difftools plugin alternative

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi Bastian,

On 09/08/2011 04:50 PM, Bastian B wrote:
> I would like to know if I can or should integrate my new bazaar
> feature directly in bazaar or if I should make it available as a
> separate plugin.
It would be nice to have something like this in the core. There are 
several bugs open about this and several people have attempted to work 
on it, but nothing really seems to have made it into the tree.


> At the moment I've implemented that as a separate plugin that
> registers the diff format. This has the benefit that I have all diff
> command's options and features available and don't have to worry about
> a lot of bazaar internas. But there are some problems, for which I
> hope you can give me some advise to solve them:
> * The implementation is at the moment tightly coupled to bzrlib's
> diff.DiffFromTool and diff.DiffTree implementation as it subclasses
> them and uses some private methods. That way I avoid to copy code from
> the classes mentioned as I need a similar behavior.
That seems reasonable, I'm not sure why this is listed as a problem. :-)
> * At the moment I can't supply the --using parameter as it's mutally
> exclusive to --format. So I have no way to specify the difftool.
I don't think that the --format option is the right place to specify 
this kind of thing at a UI level - as a user I wouldn't look there if I 
wanted to have an external tool generate my diffs I think. It would 
probably make more sense to add a new option to "bzr diff" to this 
effect; this shouldn't be too hard if you already have a custom format 
registered.

> * Would it be helpful to have the the external merge tool management
> module (bzr repo Revision 5632
> revid:pqm at pqm.ubuntu.com-20110125135932-0o8d07i3j1flp6ou) apply for
> diff --using and my --format=recursdiff? What is that module used for
> at all?
I'm not really familiar with the merge tools, perhaps somebody else can 
answer this.

Cheers,

Jelmer