alt Hacker NewsYep! We spent 20 years dealing with these problems and in those 20 years nobody really solved these pain points. So we talked to some SCM vendors, bounced ideas around, built a spec, got feedback from them, repeated off-and-on for a couple years until we got the current draft, and implemented it for our needs.
It's been a few years now, and so far so good for the purposes we built it for. And it's there for any other tool or SCM authors to use if it also happens to be useful to them.
Feels more like in 20 years nobody else really has those pain points.
1. For most people using multiple SCMs is just a huge and easily-avoidable mistake. Most people can just mandate a single SCM for a project and then all these problems are moot.
2. For the things listed in TFA
That's what "patch" and "patch format" is for. It works great. Very unclear why anyone needs this. There's no standard way to code-review a binary diff (it depends what the blob is that you're diffing) so how would it help if you had this standard way to represent the diff? This goes away if people on a project agree a particular encoding (which is going to be utf-8 lets face it). If someone sends a diff in an incorrect file encoding via diffx it will still apply wrong if someone uses a non-diffx aware (aka standard) tool to apply it. So diffx doesn't really fix this problem. This goes away if you just use one SCM for a project which you should anyway for everyone's sanity.