Re: Integrating wdiff into diff

[Karl Berry]

Hi Denver,

    I'd like to fix that so one can have a few words of context around
    the changed words

Personally, I would be very grateful for that feature.  (I use wdiff a
lot to send editorial changes to authors of articles I've edited.)

    to wdiff's current output style to make it work properly as input to a
    modified patch

Is that important?  If I want to use patch, I use diff -u or diff -c.
I've never missed not being to patch with wdiff.


Anyway ... if you want to work on wdiff, I'd like to suggest a first
step of making a new standalone wdiff release.  I can agree that
integrating wdiff functionality into diff makes sense in the abstract,
but even if you prepare the patches, reviewing and integrating them
would require a substantial chunk of Paul's all-too-finite time.

Meanwhile, the currently released wdiff on ftp.gnu.org dates from 1994.
Updating that to current infrastructure and adding the word-context
feature would make for a very worthy release, and probably not all that
much effort.

If you are interested in going that route, and it's ok with Paul, I
could send you our general info about maintaining a GNU package and we
could go from there.

Paul, what do you think?

By the way, there is slightly-updated version (0.5g) from Francois
Pinard, the original author, which fixes a bad core dump bug.  It is at
http://wdiff.progiciels-bpi.ca/.  As far as I know that is the latest
code, and Francois is unlikely to work on it again in the foreseeable
future.


Thanks,
Karl