liw's blogposts

bzr OO.o support?

In re Brian Kuhn's OO.o and version control troubles.

It'd be cool to extend bzr with some plugins to allow it to handle or show differences for specific file types in ways that are useful for those. For example, OpenOffice.org Writer files are binary blobs, and it's difficult to diff them at the moment. However, it would be possible to write something that extracts the text from the blob, and shows something like a wdiff.

This could be extended to all sorts of file formats. An image diff might generate a new image that colors changed parts with red. A source code diff might understand the language and work at the level of semantic language elements.

Git has a concept of diff & merge drivers: http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitTips#HowtousegittotrackOpenDocument.28OpenOffice.2CKoffice.29files.3F

Arguably, there's a lot of work to be done, and it should also be possible to merge, not just diff.

Comment by madduck.net 2009-12-10 14:59:03 +0200
diff is already hookable, merge hook is in review
Comment by lifeless [launchpad.net] 2009-12-18 23:53:49 +0200