Re: Integrating wdiff into diff

[Denver Gingerich]

On 6/2/07, Dan Hipschman <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 02, 2007 at 06:14:41PM -0400, Denver Gingerich wrote:
> > I am interested in integrating wdiff into the diff tools, but before I
> > start work on this, it would be good to know whether some work has
> > already been done.  It looks like Paul Eggert was planning on working
> > on this
> > (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2001-06/msg00076.html),
> > but it doesn't look like diff has any of wdiff's functionality yet.
> > Has anyone started on integrating wdiff into diff?  If not, is there a
> > good reason why people have chosen not to work on it (ie. everyone
> > uses graphical diff tools these days, few people diff files with long
> > lines, etc.)?
>
> I think what Dr. Eggert meant was that he just wanted to move the wdiff
> program into the diffutils project.  I don't think he intended to get
> rid of wdiff and move its functionality into diff, as it seems you're
> wanting to do.

I guess I mis-interpreted what he was saying.  And I see the bugs
section of the wdiff man page further clarifies that: "wdiff currently
calls diff.  wdiff would be quicker and cleaner to implement if it
were part of the diff suite of programs."

Upon further reflection, I don't think it's such a bad idea to
integrate the functionality of wdiff into diff.  It seems strange to
have two separate tools that compare lines for differences when they
could be rolled into the same tool.  There are some features that
wdiff is missing that diff already has, such as the ability to
recursively compare directories.  I think it would be illogical to
implement that in wdiff when it's already in diff and the two perform
very similar functions.  Integrating wdiff into diff seems to make
more sense.

Denver