[SVN-2447] Support for external diff commands for non-text types

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: all
• Fix Version/s: unscheduled
• Component/s: cmdline client
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Subversion Importer
• Created: 22/Nov/05 09:20
• Updated: 21/Jul/09 14:28

Description

It would be really nice if we could have some sort of mechanism that allows Subversion to do diff and diff3 
(using external commands probably) on non-text types (i.e. types not marked as "text/*"). Furthermore, it 
would be very useful if this could also be done in an automated fashion (think of files with MIME-type 
"application/xml", we would always want to use some external diff command which has knowledge about 
the semantics/syntax of xml).

Possible resolution: allow the user to specify certain diff commands for certain "binary" formats in its 
config file. This would require that the hard-coded restriction in Subversion (only performing diffs/merges 
on "text/*") be removed.

See also the recent discussion on the dev-list from November 2005.

Original issue reported by tieleman

Issue Links

• is duplicated by: SVN-1202 Make diff+merge more intelligent for certain binary files