On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 03:09 +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote: > Another incidental observation from experiments with subversion: the > output from svn diff seems to be in a fairly random order (rather than > alphabetical order of filenames). Alphabetical order tends to be easier > to follow when checking svn diff output to see that the changes you're > about to commit are exactly those you intended to commit and that the > ChangeLog entries you've written correspond to those changes (e.g. the > list of files - alphabetical - in the ChangeLog entries covers all the > files in the svn diff output).
Complete alphabetical order is not in the cards for diff, at least for diffs involving server side (diffs that are client side are easily sorted by filename). This is because it would require losing the "streaminess" of the protocol (unlike cvs, the client and the server in svn are really seperate, and the client just gets a stream of results. Sorting would require at least holding all the directory entries in the server at once, before sending them to the client, if not worse), as well as their being locale issues (the server would have to know the client's locale to sort the files so they appeared in the alphabetical order you expect). In other words, so far the cost of trying to do it has outweighed the benefit of having diffs appear in some well-specified order. However, if you are satisfied with client-only diff (which is the main case when you'd be writing changelogs) working in alphabetical order, i should be able to wing that. >
