Re: Time to change pg_regress diffs to unified by default?

Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>

From: Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2017-04-07T02:14:31Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 07:01:32PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> > I personally, and I know of a bunch of other regular contributors, find
> > context diffs very hard to read.  Besides general dislike, for things
> > like regression test output context diffs are just not well suited.
> 
> Personally, I disagree completely.  Unified diffs are utterly unreadable
> for anything beyond trivial cases of small well-separated changes.
> 
> It's possible that regression failure diffs will usually fall into that
> category, but I'm not convinced.

For reading patches, I frequently use both formats.  Overall, I perhaps read
unified 3/4 of the time and context 1/4 of the time.

For regression diffs, I use PG_REGRESS_DIFF_OPTS=-u and have never converted a
regression diff to context form.  Hence, +1 for the proposed change.


Commits

  1. pg_regress: Don't use absolute paths for the diff

  2. Use standard diff separator for regression.diffs