Git 2.9’s diff.compactionHeuristic
Git (via Hacker News):
If you’ve used Git, you’ve probably looked at a lot of diffs. Most of the time the diff shows exactly what you did: changed some lines, added some new ones, or took some away. But because Git generates the diff only from seeing the “before” and “after” states of your files, sometimes the way it shows the changes can be pretty confusing.
[…]
The author probably didn’t write the loop as two out-of-order halves. But because the outer lines of the old and new loops are the same, it’s equally valid to attribute the lines either way (it’s tempting to say that the problem can be solved by always starting the added lines at the top, but that only fixes this case; you’d have the opposite problem if the new loop were added after the old).
In 2.9, Git’s diff engine learned a new heuristic: it tries to keep hunk boundaries at blank lines, shifting the hunk “up” whenever the bottom of the hunk matches the bottom of the preceding context, until we hit a blank line.
It’s experimental, so you have to enable diff.compactionHeuristic with git config. Xcode 7.3.1 comes with Git 2.7.4, and the Xcode 8 beta comes with 2.8.1.
