Re: diff as a library?

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 01:49:12PM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> It would be useful to have the main functionality of the "diff" program
> in a GPLed library. The forthcoming GNU gettext program "msgdiff" needs to
> call diff hundreds of times for a given 100 KB input file, and users would
> complain that it is slow. It would be faster if msgdiff could use a library,
> that returns a list of hunks for two given string arrays passed in memory.

a hack: couldn't you just make hunderds of links to the file and then use
diff -r ?  (At least on Unix-like platforms.)

But maybe that shared lib is the right solution here.  If you don't have
the capacity to do it yourself, you could also try to create a quest:
make it a self-contained excercise and/or offer a T-shirt with color
gettext logo for the author of an implementation you'll like most.
But I'd say you should ask for improvement of msgdiff speed, not specifying
which method should be used.  (Though you can say that the method must be
so clean that you'll like it.)

Regards,
        Stepan Kasal