[fiddlerwoaroof]

I wonder about the importance of minimality: it itself seems like a heuristic for “interest” or some other thing that users of diffs actually care about.

For example, a diff like:

    + x += 1
    - x -= 1

Seems almost useless: it doesn’t provide any context about the meaning of x and, as a result, nearly every source review tool provides unchanged line in addition to highlighting the change. And, even then, by preventing comments on arbitrary lines of the file, GitHub’s code review makes it pretty hard to call out other relevant code.

[znkr]

A minimal diff is one where the number of edits is minimal. The context around edited lines does not count as edits, because they are matching lines. That said, minimal is definitely only a proxy, that’s why is a good property to relax.