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Hi. I have a java file. The only between the actual local version and the version in CVS is that I have added in a String literal an additional space. When I do a CVS compare and have enabled the "Ignore White Space" button the CVS compare window show me no differences between the two versions. Suggestion : The "Ignore white space" option should NOT hide changes in String literals ! Cheers - Marcel.
Yes, this happens in 3.1M2 and is quite annoying
Works as designed: the "ignore white space" option of the text compare isn't Java aware. However, I agree it would be a useful feature to have. But it is hard to implement right because the text differencing algorithm is line oriented and not token oriented.
Only spaces in the beginning and end of the line should be considered as white space to ignore. Spaces in the middle of the line should not.
No, ignoring only leading or trailing white space is not that helpful in light of formatting changes wihin a line. I prefer to have whitespace in strings not showing up in text compare, but seeing it in the (Java aware) structure compare.
Fine. But IMHO, selecting 'ignore white space' is most helpful to prevent formatting changes from showing up. The most common use case being comparing a version in CVS, sometimes across different CR/LF platforms. I'm less interested in the newline change than the changes to the actual meaning of the text. Personally, I would be willing to receive some false positives (i.e. changes in pure whitespace within the line that were caused by formatting) rather than missing some real positives (adding a space to a string!). If I wanted to see all formatting changes I would probably turn 'ignore white space' off. Alternatively this could be a separate option.
The bug seems to touch a similar issue as bug 203880, or at least fixing bug 203880 would also fix this one. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 203880 ***
