As some of you know, I find myself often providing enhancement and bug-fix patches.

It occurred to me that it would be nice if Compare Revisions was able to return a patch (e.g. diff -U5) file as an upload.

Then when a documentation topic is updated, once could select the previous and updated revision, click & have a patch file to distribute.

Currently this is a command-line process that depends on the topic storage backend (e.g. rcsdiff) and a certain amount of fumbling around to find the right versions. Compare revisions already knows how to find the revision history, has a reasonable GU for displaying/selecting, calls the right storage module to get the diff - all it needs is to have a new (quite simple) output format option, and send the Content-Disposition: attachment header...

I know this bypasses all the smarts in CompareRevision? - but it does already have almost everything necessary, and it doesn't seem worthwhile to add yet another compare plugin (and update the various magic that knows about a topic being compared...)

Obviously, the audience is developers/doc maintainers, not end users...

-- TimotheLitt - 29 May 2011

Cool idea. Set as enhancement

-- PaulHarvey - 30 May 2011