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From: | Dmitry Gutov |
Subject: | bug#20290: 25.0.50; Use unified diff format by default, and recommend using it in reports and patches |
Date: | Tue, 14 Apr 2015 05:16:28 +0300 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/36.0 |
On 04/13/2015 02:30 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
As I recall, RMS preferred diff -c to diff -u, and that is partly why trouble.texi suggests -c over -u and why diff-switches defaults to -c.
Yup, Stephen reminded of that in a recent emacs-devel thread, so I thought this would be a good time to try to change it.
These days -u format is far more popular than -c format in practice, and I expect that most active Emacs developers prefer -u, so it's appropriate for Emacs to default to -u and for trouble.texi to suggest it.
This is done now. Thanks everyone.
I suppose that in theory there is the issue of Emacs running on an older POSIXish platform where 'diff' does not support -u. I don't have access to any such platform, though. I can confirm that Solaris 10 diff (2005) supports '-u'. So perhaps we don't need to worry about this.
I think the usual response is that users on outdated systems don't necessarily have to be able to use the latest-and-greatest Emacs.
But in this case the incompatibility would be very minor: if someone actually encounters this problem, they'll only need to customize the relevant variable.
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