alt Hacker NewsExactly that. They all do things so differently that you end up creating and maintaining a separate parser for every SCM's diff format, and sometimes doing a lot of normalization of content or modification to include information the format lacks that's needed to apply the patches. And those are just for the ones that actually have a diff format -- many don't.
We needed something for ourselves at the very least. Much of DiffX came from thinking about these pain points and from talking to other SCM vendors whose engineers have also given some thought to these problems.
Replies
> They all do things so differently that you end up creating and maintaining a separate parser for every SCM's diff format (...)
...and you seriously believe that pushing yet another ad-hoc format, and one which no one at all uses, is a way to address your concern?
DiffX would have been nice to have available way back when I was trying to add support for our custom in-house vcs to Review Board. We had to either contort the diffs from our vcs to some format already understood by Review Board, which was sometimes difficult due to how the vcs structured the data it stored, or add a whole new parser to our Review Board instance, which would have been a major maintenance pain.
As an aside, I applaud you for creating Review Board. I've introduced its usage with several teams that I've worked with, and it really helped change how those teams operated, from a fly-by-night sort of development to actually having a process; The reduction in bugs and improvement in code quality were quite useful too.