[PD] towards better diff [was: Portuguese translation of the PD manual]

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sat Aug 14 02:08:05 CEST 2010


On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> It is how the Pd patch looks that is meaningful, so I think that 
> rendering an image of each patch/subpatch then using some kind of visual 
> diff would be a good place to start.

There is the Visual Diff feature in desiredata, which blinks a big .gif 
file over a complete patcher, but this was meant for showing difference in 
rendering for the same patch in two pd versions.

Such a visual diff doesn't work when the patch has been spliced with new 
content because the blinking doesn't enhance the meaningful difference. 
the gif would have to be slided manually over the patch to account for 
insertions. Well, it could be done automatically too, but that's 
relatively very complicated. Then handling long patches and subpatches to 
make sure every change gets noticed, would be more complications.

In the end, what is important is not how the Pd patch looks, it's the 
content of the pd file. But not all of it : the ordering of the objects 
has to be somehow ignored, normalised or controlled in some way.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801


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