Re: [bug-diffutils] Funny behaviour of diff 2.8.1

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/19/10 11:55, Philipp Thomas wrote:

> Oh, gdb proves that it's the freopen because of binary being true that's
> causing diff to fail on ksh.

OK, but that doesn't mean the proposed fix is appropriate; it may cause
some problems elsewhere.

> I'm quoting the 2.8.7-cvs version that our distribution currently uses.
> As I wrote in the mail (OK, I see I left out the -cvs).

Where is the source code that your distribution currently uses?
 
>> I'm also skeptical of this fix.  Perhaps it makes one symptom go away in
>> one test case, but it's quite possible that it causes problems elsewhere.
> 
> why should it cause
> problems?

I don't know exactly; I just have That Feeling.  Wouldn't it be better if
you backported the fix that is in diffutils upstream?  Here it is:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/diffutils.git/commit/?id=b50a16567acff496bdf3ac0004809b6dcc88c2d6

By the way, this patch works around bugs in freopen on Solaris and *BSD,
and it appears that those bugs are in SUSE too, so you might want to
further investigate that.  I don't observe similar problems in Ubuntu.