Re: svn diff branch woprking copy against mainline?

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 06:28:42PM -0500, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 14:33 -0800, Mike Stump wrote:
> > On Nov 2, 2005, at 2:18 PM, Joern RENNECKE wrote:
> > > I tried:
> > > bash-2.05b$ svn diff Makefile.in svn+ssh://amylaar@gcc.gnu.org/svn/ 
> > > gcc/trunk/gcc/Makefile.in@106390
> > >
> > > But that gives me an error message:
> > >
> > > svn: Target lists to diff may not contain both working copy paths  
> > > and URLs
> > 
> > This works for us:
> > 
> > svn diff --old svn+ssh://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/tags/gcc_4_0_1_release/ 
> > gcc/file.c --new file.c
> > 
> > for example.
> > 
> > svn needs to go on a long command line diet, 
> 
> True.
> However, it *does* need some way to differentiate between url->url,
> url->wc, and wc->url commands, so even if there was an SVNROOT, you'd
> still have to specify it  on the command lines :)

It certainly seems that --old and --new are redundant.  Also, you could
consider stealing some ideas from Perforce, where the command would be
something like

p4 diff file.c@gcc_4_0_1_release file.c

and the RCS figures out how to map the label to the repository version.
Basically, the # and @ characters are special; # is used to introduce
a revision number (the global revision number), and a number of things
can follow @, like a label, or a date.