diff.c: add white space mode to move detection that allows indent changes

The option of --color-moved has proven to be useful as observed on the
mailing list. However when refactoring sometimes the indentation changes,
for example when partitioning a functions into smaller helper functions
the code usually mostly moved around except for a decrease in indentation.

To just review the moved code ignoring the change in indentation, a mode
to ignore spaces in the move detection as implemented in a previous patch
would be enough.  However the whole move coloring as motivated in commit
2e2d5ac (diff.c: color moved lines differently, 2017-06-30), brought
up the notion of the reviewer being able to trust the move of a "block".

As there are languages such as python, which depend on proper relative
indentation for the control flow of the program, ignoring any white space
change in a block would not uphold the promises of 2e2d5ac that allows
reviewers to pay less attention to the inside of a block, as inside
the reviewer wants to assume the same program flow.

This new mode of white space ignorance will take this into account and will
only allow the same white space changes per line in each block. This patch
even allows only for the same change at the beginning of the lines.

As this is a white space mode, it is made exclusive to other white space
modes in the move detection.

This patch brings some challenges, related to the detection of blocks.
We need a wide net to catch the possible moved lines, but then need to
narrow down to check if the blocks are still intact. Consider this
example (ignoring block sizes):

 - A
 - B
 - C
 +    A
 +    B
 +    C

At the beginning of a block when checking if there is a counterpart
for A, we have to ignore all space changes. However at the following
lines we have to check if the indent change stayed the same.

Checking if the indentation change did stay the same, is done by computing
the indentation change by the difference in line length, and then assume
the change is only in the beginning of the longer line, the common tail
is the same. That is why the test contains lines like:

 - <TAB> A
 ...
 + A <TAB>
 ...

As the first line starting a block is caught using a compare function that
ignores white spaces unlike the rest of the block, where the white space
delta is taken into account for the comparison, we also have to think about
the following situation:

 - A
 - B
 -   A
 -   B
 +    A
 +    B
 +      A
 +      B

When checking if the first A (both in the + and - lines) is a start of
a block, we have to check all 'A' and record all the white space deltas
such that we can find the example above to be just one block that is
indented.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/diff-options.txt b/Documentation/diff-options.txt
index 80e29e3985..143acd9417 100644
--- a/Documentation/diff-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/diff-options.txt
@@ -307,6 +307,11 @@ ignore-space-change::
 ignore-all-space::
 	Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences
 	even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
+allow-indentation-change::
+	Initially ignore any white spaces in the move detection, then
+	group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in
+	whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the
+	other modes.
 --
 
 --word-diff[=<mode>]::