view CONTRIBUTORS @ 29013:9a8363d23419 stable

bdiff: deal better with duplicate lines

The longest_match code compares all the possible positions in two
files to find the best match. Given a pair of sequences, it
effectively searches a grid like this:

  a b b b c . d e . f
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
a 1 - - - - - - - - -
b - 2 1 1 - - - - - -
b - 1 3 2 - - - - - -
b - 1 2 4 - - - - - -
. - - - - - 1 - - 1 -


Here, the 4 in the middle says "the first four lines of the
file match", which it can compute be comparing the fourth lines and
then adding one to the result found when comparing the third lines in
the entry to the upper left.

We generally avoid the quadratic worst case by only looking at lines
that match, which is precomputed. We also avoid quadratic storage by
only keeping a single column vector and then keeping track of the best
match.

Unfortunately, this can get us into trouble with the sequences above.
Because we want to reuse the '3' value when calculating the '4', we
need to be careful not to overwrite it with the '2' we calculate
immediately before. If we scan left to right, top to bottom, we're
going to have a problem: we'll overwrite our 3 before we use it and
calculate a suboptimal best match.

To address this, we can either keep two column vectors and swap
between them (which significantly complicates bookkeeping), or change
our scanning order. If we instead scan from left to right, bottom to
top, we'll avoid ever overwriting values we'll need in the future.

This unfortunately needs several changes to be made simultaneously:

- change the order we build the initial hash chains for the b sequence
- change the sentinel values from INT_MAX to -1
- change the visit order in the longest_match inner loop
- add a tie-breaker preference for earlier matches

This last is needed because we previously had an implicit tie-breaker
from our visitation order that our test suite relies on. Later matches
can also trigger a bug in the normalization code in diff().

[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]

Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent Seguí Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>