diff -u, -e

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Fri Jun 26 20:19:49 UTC 2009


On Friday 26 June 2009 14:19:03 Cathey, Jim wrote:
> We have a product that uses diff (non-u) outputs
> as part of what it presents to the operator.
> (The old-style < and > marked lines.)  BB diff
> doesn't have the -u option, and always seems to
> emit the new -u format, so it would be awkward for
> me to implement the diff-using feature on our
> next-gen platform.  (Gratuitous operator-seen
> changes in our product line's behavior are unwelcome.)
>
> Would there be any objection to my teaching diff
> that it could have an optional -u argument, and that
> if enabled then -u formatting would not be the default?
> I think there would be very little code involved in this,
> and then I could go on to implement that product's feature.
>
> What about the -e (ed-script) format output?  Same question,
> we have another related feature that uses that internally.
> (No, -e is never the default output format!)

Oh please no.

Unified diff format is ubiquitous.  I can see the point of adding a NOP -u 
option just so busybox diff won't complain about scripts that specify that, but 
if you add obsolete diff output formats to our diff, then it'll later be used as 
a justification to add them to our patch...

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds


More information about the busybox mailing list