HTTP/1.1 Redraft: Notes on diffs

I spent a lot of time trying to minimize changes during the partition of RFC 2616 into the first seven parts, such that the set of differences would be limited to either removing entire sections (because they belong in a different part) or replacing xref markup with entity references (because the XSLT doesn't understand multi-file references).

The GNU diff -du oldfile newfile command is quite good at producing a minimal diff against the baseline rfc2626.xml. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for any of the other diff utilities that I have tried. In particular, the viewvc program on Apache's subversion is worse than hopeless for large changes due to a lame algorithm in Python's difflib.

In any case, the partitioning is done (as of rev 584020) and now it is time for some real changes to the text. If you want to see the changes during partitioning, then I suggest checking out the baseline tag in subversion: svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/labs/webarch/tags/draft-fielding-http/partioned2616 and then use "diff -du" directly on the files.

If you want to see the text changes after the partitioning, you can checkout trunk (see Repository) and do diffs against rev 584020, such as: svn diff -r584020 p1-messaging.html or checkout both trunk and the partitioned2616 tag (above) and do file diffs.

Finally, for small changes, the viewvc script is adequate and you can see the individual changes per file online with fancy diffs.