Use cases

Fundamentally, we envision use cases mainly in the categories of a merge command for version control integration, and diff command for inspecting changes and automated regression testing. At the core of it all is the diff algorithms, which must handle not only text in source cells but also a number of data formats based on mime types in output cells.

Basic diffing use cases

We assume that basic correct diffing is fairly straightforward to implement, but there are still some issues to discuss.

Other tasks (will make issues of these):

• Pretty-printing of diff for commandline output.
• Plugin framework for mime type specific diffing.
• Diffing of common output types (png, svg, etc.)
• Improve fundamental sequence diff algorithm. Current algorithm is based on a brute force O(N^2) longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm, this will be rewritten in terms of a faster algorithm such as Myers O(ND) LCS based diff algorithm, optionally using Pythons difflib for some use cases where it.

Version control use cases

Most commonly, cell source is the primary content, and output can presumably be regenerated. Indeed, it is not possible to guarantee that merged sources and merged output is consistent or makes any kind of sense.

Some tasks:

• Merge of output cell content is not planned.
• Is it important to track source lines moving between cells?

Regression testing use cases

Todo

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