[bug-diffutils] Re: [patch] i18n patch for diffutils

[Jim Meyering]

Matthew Burgess wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:02:15 +0100, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> However, in this case, the patch ends up duplicating
>> a lot of important logic, and I'm holding out hope
>> that we'll end up with multibyte support that avoids
>> that maintenance pitfall while still retaining most of
>> the single-byte performance.
>
> I notice that Padraig Brady mentioned libunistring when a similar
> issue was noted in Coreutils (pinky) -
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-01/msg00234.html.

That's the plan.

> Do GNU projects have a consistent stance on the use of that relatively
> new library as a dependency?  I'm wondering if diffutils were

It sounds fine to me, and I'm confident that at least coreutils
and diffutils will have a consistent stance ;-)

> interested in utilising it, would it be OK for a patch that did so to
> have it as a hard dependency, to save having to have multiple branches
> in the code to handle its presence/absence?

That's a fine place to start.  Once we have something acceptable,
if someone wants badly enough to build without that library, they'll
find a way to contribute the patch.