provide proto diff about buf

[bufdev]

#26

It's an interesting feature request, there's a lot of problems in the details, however. What would you propose as to the format of the output diff?

[yangzh]

thanks for getting back to me!

At first thought, can we simply use unified diff format (https://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/manual/html_node/Unified-Format.html), on top of that, color-syntax and other tools can be built as well.

[bufdev]

Can you provide an example?

[yangzh]

How about this

You can also pass in arguments from man diff.

[bufdev]

Question: why do you need buf to have a separate command to do this? Ie what do you think buf check diff will do differently than, for example, git diff?

[yangzh]

good question, I guess I haven't thought this through.

Yes, I think git diff will do (at least majority) of the work.

but diff can potentially group and compare fields (of the same tag) together, even if someone has moved the field elsewhere, as it parses the protobuf schema.

However, I think that's a bit too far and uses cases not well-defined: we can always enforce good practice to prevent that.

In that case, I would say don't bother with buf. Thanks and sorry for the trouble.

[bufdev]

Sounds good! Let us know if you need anything else here.