Re: [PATCH 2/3] xdiff: -W: include immediately preceding non-empty lines in context

["René Scharfe" <l.s.r@web.de>]

Am 14.01.2017 um 00:56 schrieb Junio C Hamano:
> Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> writes:
>
>> The patch will work as intended and as expected for 95% of the users out
>> there (javadoc, Doxygen, kerneldoc, etc. all have the comment
>> immediately preceding the function) and fixes a very real problem for me
>> (and I expect many others) _today_; for the remaining 5% (who put a
>> blank line between their comment and the start of the function) it will
>> revert back to the current behaviour, so there should be no regression
>> for them.
>
> I notice your 95% are all programming languages, but I am more
> worried about the contents written in non programming languages
> (René gave HTML an an example--there may be other types of contents
> that we programmer types do not deal with every day, but Git users
> depend on).
>
> I am also more focused on keeping the codebase maintainable in good
> health by making sure that we made an effort to find a solution that
> is general-enough before solving a single specific problem you have
> today.  We may end up deciding that a blank-line heuristics gives us
> good enough tradeoff, but I do not want us to make a decision before
> thinking.

How about extending the context upward only up to and excluding a line 
that is either empty *or* a function line?  That would limit the extra 
context to a single function in the worst case.

Reducing context at the bottom with the aim to remove comments for the 
next section is more tricky as it could remove part of the function that 
we'd like to show if we get the boundary wrong.  How bad would it be to 
keep the southern border unchanged?

René