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submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 0 points 5 months ago

Everything git does is "keeping files with extra steps."

Not quite, because text files are stored as incremental diffs, which not only saves massive amounts of space but allows for effective comparisons of what exactly has changed between versions. While the former is more of a nice bonus these days with storage being extremely cheap, the latter is in fact the main reason one would use git to begin with.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

Binary files too can be stored as incremental diffs

[-] MacNCheezus@lemmy.today -2 points 5 months ago

Yes but without the ability to quickly see what’s changed between different versions (on a semantic level), all it will do for you is safe you some storage.

With a bunch of separate files, you can at least open two of them quickly and do a manual scan, but with git you can only ever have one version checked out at the same time, so now you’ll be checking out an older version, making a temporary copy of that, and then checking out the version you want to compare it to and STILL end up doing just that.

From a workflow perspective, it’s really just extra overhead, with little to no practical benefit.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

With a bunch of separate files, you can at least open two of them quickly and do a manual scan, but with git you can only ever have one version checked out at the same time, so now you’ll be checking out an older version, making a temporary copy of that, and then checking out the version you want to compare it to and STILL end up doing just that.

What? I don't understand what are you trying to say. Are you trying to do manual scan of xml inside? It's useless, internal format is not intended to be human-readable. But you can use regular git diff anyway.

Or if you want to compare rendered documents, then you probably need to make git diff driver. Or checkout multiple worktrees and use libreoffice's comparasion.

[-] MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 1 points 5 months ago

I meant the last one of those. If you have a directory of lose files, you can just open any of them and compare them directly, but if they're all in git, you'll either have to make a copy of your current version before checking out the other one (because it would be overwritten otherwise), or like you said, use multiple worktrees, which is a rather advanced feature (that I honestly didn't even know existed until now).

Either way it's a bunch of extra work and it's only necessary because you chose the wrong tool for the job.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Or call libreoffice as diff driver.

[-] MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 2 points 5 months ago

This might work

[-] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

I imagine script that outputs pandiff into pdf and opens okular. Yep.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago

I don't want to engage in this conversation if you're going to ignore everything else I said about how binary files since that what were talking about.