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A scene from Ireland

Wiggles and Diffs at LCA

My second talk at LCA2013 - the first one accepted - was on "wiggle", my tool for applying patches that don't apply. In the presentation I wanted to explain how "diff" works - as I then wanted to explain why one of the things that wiggle does is more complex that a simple "diff". For this I came up with a simple animation that I presented as a series of "impress" slides. Some suggested I make them into an animated "gif", so I did. And here it is (click for a higher-res version):

Animation of Diff algorithm

Among the useful feedback I got about wiggle:

  • UTF-8 support would be good. This only applies to the way it breaks strings into words. Currently it only understand ASCII
  • Detecting patterns of "replace A with B" and looking for unreplaced copies of "A" in the original might be useful.

The slides in LibreOffice format are here and the recording of the talk is here