[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Otto]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Mike Schinkel
<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> Question: what happens if the line numbers change?  I've seen a lot of cases where the latest function is identical but other code in the same file has changed.

The original GNU patch had a fairly primitive fuzzy matching system.
Modern implementations tend to use smarter algorithms to better detect
where and how to make a patch from a diff. They're fairly far from
perfect, but all of them can generally handle line numbers being
wrong. That's why diff's include context around changes as well, to
provide the unchanged lines to look for and such.

-Otto