Re: [xwiki-devs] Diff module

Hi devs, Since there is not official standard for diff/merge API I started to write a simple one. Yo can find it on https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-commons/tree/feature-diff/xwiki-commons-core…. The first use case for it is to provide a diff/merge API for the Extension Manager XAR merging conflict resolution UI. It is mostly inspired from JRCS/java-diff-utils APIs and implemented using java-diff-utils (http://code.google.com/p/java-diff-utils/) for the diff and JDiff (http://www.qarks.com/web/en/products_jdiff.html) for the multiline String merge. Theses are the most active independent libraries I could find so far and it's not really what I would call active library usually... Would be nice to get some comments/suggestions on the API.

For the implementation side if you know some good diff/merge tool I would be glad to get some other suggestions. I took a quick look at various EDIs which obviously have this kind of tools but what I could find is not really designed to be used easily outside of the EDI for which they have been designed. Either its very tied to the EDI itself or it's generic enough but trigger a whole bunch of dependencies while we would use like 1% of the total. Here are the various features I'm looking for in an ideal library: * good 3 ways merge ("good" is not a detail, applying a patch on the third version does not always give very good results) * diff/patch API * support of single line in 3 ways merge and diff