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by appplication 1038 days ago
> line-granularity has good usability properties

I was reviewing a PR today and have to disagree with you. There was a single value change in a jsonl test data file. This is nightmarish to read in regular git diffs, as the change gif thought was happening was (with text wrapping) an full page worth of json rather than identifying it was a single word change. And because it is jsonl, the file could not be split into different lines without altering it’s semantics.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable we could be a little smarter here.
4 comments
gorgoiler 1038 days ago
JSONL and line-oriented version control are never going to play nicely together.

Imagine doing code review in a language where every function had to be written on one line!

The two techniques I use to dodge this:

1/ Switch from JSONL to a list of objects then pretty print it to be line oriented.

2/ Compress the test data to discourage viewing it altogether, and make people describe what’s being changed rather than leaving it up to the diff to show it.

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hurril 1038 days ago
Diffs come with column offset coordinates, though, so perhaps it's your diff editor that needs some more muscle?
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Groxx 1037 days ago
I can believe that they can come with that... but `man diff` doesn't mention it at all, I can't find any description of the diff/patch format that mentions it, and I've literally never seen it. I do frequently get multi-megabyte single-line diffs though, which amount to just one or two characters changing.

Other tools exist, of course, but if you're going to be shipping around stuff that `git apply` or thousands of other tools can handle, it has to be in "the" standard format.

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nsajko 1038 days ago
Yeah, meld handles this fine.
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heavenlyblue 1038 days ago
Simply auto-format that jsonl file and your git is going to be happy.
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Hendrikto 1038 days ago
You could just use a better diff tool. Git itself is format-agnostic.
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pastage 1038 days ago
This is an area where it should be easier to build tools for that. I have tools for diffing k/v and structured formats but they are local on my machine. Being able to publish those to Gitlab, github and bitbucket would be great.

Edit: Worst is diffing yaml files, you really need a stable way to parse those.

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