Re: Check for diff3 is incorrect in ediff-exec-process

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 12 Mar 2001, Roman Belenov wrote:

> ediff-exec-process checks whether it uses diff3 (in order to discard
> --binary flag which diff3 doesn't support) using (string-match
> "buffers3" job-name) It fails when ediff is used by PCL-CVS and
> --binary option is passed to diff3 which results in an error (I'm
> using Windows 2000 so that system-type is windows-nt).

Thank you for your report.

This test is done differently in the development sources: it actually
tries to invoke both `diff' and `diff3' with the --binary option and
see if that succeeds.  If it fails, all invocations of the respective
program will be without --binary.

> IMHO (string-match "diff3" program) check is more correct (reaction to
> '--binary' option is the property of diff3 utility itself).

Yes, but the --binary option is only needed when comparing buffers.
It should not be used when comparing files, because it will do the
wrong thing then (e.g., identical lines with different EOL format will
compare unequal).