diff: add --ignore-blank-lines option

The goal of the patch is to introduce the GNU diff
-B/--ignore-blank-lines as closely as possible. The short option is not
available because it's already used for "break-rewrites".

When this option is used, git-diff will not create hunks that simply
add or remove empty lines, but will still show empty lines
addition/suppression if they are close enough to "valuable" changes.

There are two differences between this option and GNU diff -B option:
- GNU diff doesn't have "--inter-hunk-context", so this must be handled
- The following sequence looks like a bug (context is displayed twice):

    $ seq 5 >file1
    $ cat <<EOF >file2
    change
    1
    2

    3
    4
    5
    change
    EOF
    $ diff -u -B file1 file2
    --- file1	2013-06-08 22:13:04.471517834 +0200
    +++ file2	2013-06-08 22:13:23.275517855 +0200
    @@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
    +change
     1
     2
    +
     3
     4
     5
    @@ -3,3 +5,4 @@
     3
     4
     5
    +change

So here is a more thorough description of the option:
- real changes are interesting
- blank lines that are close enough (less than context size) to
interesting changes are considered interesting (recursive definition)
- "context" lines are used around each hunk of interesting changes
- If two hunks are separated by less than "inter-hunk-context", they
will be merged into one.

The implementation does the "interesting changes selection" in a single
pass.

Signed-off-by: Antoine Pelisse <apelisse@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/diff-options.txt b/Documentation/diff-options.txt
index 104579dc75..80f06b771b 100644
--- a/Documentation/diff-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/diff-options.txt
@@ -439,6 +439,9 @@ endif::git-format-patch[]
 	differences even if one line has whitespace where the other
 	line has none.
 
+--ignore-blank-lines::
+	Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
+
 --inter-hunk-context=<lines>::
 	Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number
 	of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other.