In message: <20020425210035.A43192@espresso.q9media.com>
Mike Barcroft <mike@FreeBSD.ORG> writes:
: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> writes:
: > And now, a mere two months later, I finally looked into it.
: > Changing 'diff' is trivial, but the main issue is changing
: > 'patch' to match.
: >
: > I found out that NetBSD had made changes to 'patch' so it
: > does understand these lines. I copy&pasted those changes
: > into our version, and it looks like it works right. The
: > patch is pretty straightforward, and I would like to get
: > it into our patch in for 4.6-release (along with the minor
: > change to 'diff'). Any objections?
:
: Yes. I still maintain that files without a trailing new line are not
: "text files", and should therefore be treated as binary files. Even
: if we did consider these to be "text files", no standards that I'm
: aware of define the behavior for this situation, so a non-standard
: patch utility would be required to interpret these extensions. This
: would make our generated diffs unportable in the same way as some of
: the other vendors you mentioned as having this feature.
There's lots of software (well, OK, subversion) that depends on the
old, historical behavior. The historical behavior of diff has been to
include the "this file doesn't end with a newline" message, not what
FreeBSD hacked it to do.
Warner
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