'bzr diff' should include file revision numbers

[Frédéric Buclin]

In Bugzilla, we have a feature which displays a patch with any given number of context lines, independently of the original number of context lines included in the patch (usually 3). For patches generated by 'cvs diff' we do this thanks to the revision number of the files included in the patch, and then get the files with these specific revision numbers. When the patch is generated using 'bzr diff', no revision number is included in the patch:

=== modified file 'process_bug.cgi'
--- process_bug.cgi 2007-10-12 07:21:59 +0000
+++ process_bug.cgi 2007-11-25 18:58:35 +0000
@@ -1223,6 +1223,10 @@
....

This means we have no easy way to know which revision numbers the patch was generated against and this makes us hard to know which original files to download (a workaround is to use the timestamp included in the headers, and to do a 'bzr cat -r date:', but that's not ideal). To be able to handle patches generated by Bazaar the same way as we do with CVS, we need this information by default when a patch is generated by 'bzr diff'.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

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Frédéric Buclin wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> In Bugzilla, we have a feature which displays a patch with any given
> number of context lines, independently of the original number of context
> lines included in the patch (usually 3). For patches generated by 'cvs
> diff' we do this thanks to the revision number of the files included in
> the patch, and then get the files with these specific revision numbers.
> When the patch is generated using 'bzr diff', no revision number is
> included in the patch:
>
> === modified file 'process_bug.cgi'
> --- process_bug.cgi 2007-10-12 07:21:59 +0000
> +++ process_bug.cgi 2007-11-25 18:58:35 +0000
> @@ -1223,6 +1223,10 @@
> ....
>
> This means we have no easy way to know which revision numbers the patch
> was generated against and this makes us hard to know which original
> files to download (a workaround is to use the timestamp included in the
> headers, and to do a 'bzr cat -r date:', but that's not ideal). To be
> able to handle patches generated by Bazaar the same way as we do with
> CVS, we need this information by default when a patch is generated by
> 'bzr diff'.
>

It might be reasonable to add this as 'bzr diff --show-ids', which is
how some of the other commands deal with this.

John
=:->

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[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I'm declining this for the bugfix-only 2.0 and 2.1 series because this would clearly be a new feature.

[Mathias Brodala (mathbr)]

Since version 2.2 is about to be released, how is the status on this one? It could prove really handy since it lets the user know which revision is required beforehand.

[Andrew Bennetts (spiv)]

Mathias: no-one has started work on this (or if they have, they haven't updated the bug). It probably is fairly straightforward, so if you are interested working on a patch that would probably be faster than waiting for someone else to do it :)

As always, we'd be happy to help (by guiding you to the relevant part of the code, reviewing patches, answering questions about APIs, etc).

There's still time to get this into 2.2, I think.