Diffs in Baselines

[keithwelch]

I am very much interested in promoting the use of EA deep into the development cycle. One of the things I've been doing is using the baseline management functionality to publish changes in our IDL between release versions to our partners.

While the Compare Utility between baselines appears to work, I have one rather serious problem with the way it operates: When the position property of an item (attribute or operation) changes, this item is marked as changed. This means that every method that occurs after a new or deleted method is marked as changed!

Can anyone think of any reason why that mode of functionality would ever be useful? This type of comparison utility needs to work at the logical level, ignoring the order. Otherwise, I might as well just diff the source code. This implies that some intermediate product must place the attributes/operations in sorted order to avoid this.

The output options on this utility might also be extended. I think that supplying a couple of XSLT transformation options to the XML log output might be enough. This is an enhancement, though. I'm much more concerned about the possibility of publishing erroneous diffs just because EA has odd ideas as to what constitutes a change.

[mikewhit]

... or even to be able to specify a filter in which you could detail features that were to be compared and those that were not, and those which were to be order-sensitive and those not.