subversion diff

Normally, subversion uses a builtin diff command to show you your changes. This works pretty well most of the time, except that you can’t use it to disable whitespace-only changes. How to do this isn’t spelled out 100% clearly in the FAQ, so here’s what I found out:

1. Make a shell script ~/bin/svn_diff. It should look like this:

   #!/bin/sh
   exec diff -bu "$@"

2. chmod +x ~/bin/svn_diff
3. Put these lines in ~/.subversion/config:

   [helpers]
   diff-cmd = /home/dom/bin/svn_diff

Naturally, you can adjust the diff flags to taste in the svn_diff script..