Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Diff switches

[Aaron Bentley]

Neil Booth wrote:
> Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but the fact that Arch
> doesn't pass -p to gdiff with changes --diffs and file-diffs, and
> doesn't give you a way to do so, is annoying when writing GNU
> changelogs.  Is this something I've missed or something that's
> planned?  Some way of getting Arch to pass through one's favourite
> diff flags would be nice.

The 'changes' command generates a changeset and then prints its 
contents.  diff is invoked as part of the changeset generation-- the 
same routines are used to create revisions in the archive.  You can 
understand why folks aren't eager to mess with them.

I'm not familiar with that switch; how does it handle non-C files?  If 
the switch should only be applied to certain files, that complicates 
matters further.

For individual files, there's a scripting answer:
diff -p $FILE $(tla file-find $FILE $REVISION)

You can also use the aba viewdiff command to do this.  Just do export 
VIEWDIFF="diff -p".  (Me, I use viewdiff to invoke vimdiff, but anything 
that compares two files will work.)

Aaron