Re: [PATCH 0/2] color-moved: ignore all space changes by default

[Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 12:22 AM, Simon Ruderich <simon@ruderich.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 03:46:18PM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 7:52 PM, Stefan Beller wrote[1]:
>>> On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 6:54 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  * As moved-lines display is mostly a presentation thing, I wonder
>>>>    if it makes sense to always match loosely wrt whitespace
>>>>    differences.
>>>
>>> Well, sometimes the user wants to know if it is byte-for-byte identical
>>> (unlikely to be code, but maybe column oriented data for input;
>>> think of all our FORTRAN users. ;)
>>
>> ... and this is the implementation and the flip of the default setting
>> to ignore all white space for the move detection.
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm not sure if this is a good default. I think it's not obvious
> that moved code gets treated differently than regular changes. I
> wouldn't expect git diff to ignore whitespace changes (without me
> telling it to) and so when I see moved code I expect they were
> moved as is.
>
> And there are languages where indentation is relevant (e.g.
> Python, YAML) and as color-moved is also treated as review tool
> to detect unwanted changes this new default can be dangerous.
>
> The new options sound like a good addition but I don't think the
> defaults should change. However unrelated to this decision,
> please add config settings in addition to these new options so
> users can globally configure the behavior they want.
>
> Regards
> Simon
> --

Even languages which are indentation sensitive often move blocks of
lines between indentation levels a lot. I personally think the default
could change.

However, I would suspect the best path forward is leave the default
"exact match" and allow users who care and know about the feature to
change their config settings.

Thanks,
Jake