[ncc-services-wg] Pre-PDP discussion: "All PDP emails, documents and websites should come with unified diff"

Dear all,

this is the third suggestion:


  All PDP-related emails, web pages, and other documents by RIPE will
either carry a unified diff (diff -ruN) or directly link to a page
which shows said unified diff.

  Other formats, like full text, old/new text, etc are encouraged as
well, but the diff is the binding format in which PDPs are published,
documented, and discussed.


Rationale: It's needlessly hard to read and compare full or partial
text dumps, forcing people to do work by themselves and for themselves
which a computer could do once and for all.


A XML-based format that's parse-able by new tools has been proposed as
an alternative. This would mean extra work while defining the XML
format, to write new tools, and cut of the extensive tools and
workflows around unified diffs.


The point has also been raised that word diffs may be easier to read.

Quoth the manpage: Nevermerge!

               Show words as [-removed-] and {+added+}. Makes no
attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the
output may be ambiguous.

Ironically, --word-diff in git comes with an option that allows
parsing, --porcelain, which turns word-based diff back into line-based
diffs:

               Use a special line-based format intended for script
consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual
unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the
beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines
in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a
               line of its own.



Long story short: Unified diffs are called unified diffs and
universally accepted for a reason.


Richard