Re: wdiff (was: Re: gnulib-cache.m4 readability)

[Denver Gingerich]

Added wdiff-bugs.  The previous messages in this thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2008-06/msg00264.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2008-06/msg00271.html

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> You probably already thought about it, but why not use `wdiff' for that?
>
> I think before you can recommend wdiff,
>  1) there should be a release on ftp.gnu.org that does not dump core at
>     every invocation, (*)

Yes, there should and there will be one soon (see below).  But wdiff
as it appears in the packages on most GNU/Linux distributions (with
patches to fix these sorts of things) works quite well.  The 13+ years
since the release of wdiff 0.5 has provided ample time for these
patches to become stable.

>  2) the program should support colorized output like we know it from webcvs
>     and others.

By "the program", do you mean wdiff or some web-based diff viewer?  It
would seem strange for wdiff to provide colorized output since diff
doesn't even do that; colorized diffs are produced by other tools.
But if you can make a convincing case for colorized output in wdiff,
perhaps I could add it.  Though there are lots of other fixes for
wdiff's output that would take priority, such as providing context and
line/word numbers (like "diff -u").

> (*) Yes I know there is a release wdiff-0.5.90 that works better than that,
>    but it's not on ftp.gnu.org.

wdiff 0.5.93 is now available (at http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/wdiff/),
which includes a plethora of fixes since 0.5.90.  The plan is to
release 0.6 within the next month.

Denver