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From: | Bruno Haible |
Subject: | Re: [bug-diffutils] diff: support for --no-dereference option |
Date: | Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:48:02 +0100 |
User-agent: | KMail/4.7.4 (Linux/3.1.0-1.2-desktop; KDE/4.7.4; x86_64; ; ) |
Hi Paul, > > 'patch' does not break through this additional lines. It simply ignores > > them. > > True, hence the proposed patch can be an intermediate one on > the way to building a better one. OK. Can I thus commit the patch that introduces --no-dereference? > But I suppose that we should > document that the output format is likely to change, so that > people are less likely to depend on it. It depends whether you want to work on that before the next diffutils release. > > But -P currently is equivalent to --unidirectional-new-file. > > Yeouch. I forgot about that. You're right, we'd need to take the > next step in deprecating -P. (The first step was taken in 2002, when > it was removed from the documentation, precisely for this reason -- > can you tell that this has been on the TODO list for some time?...) > > We also would need to deprecate -H and -L. -H has no effect anyway Rather, -H and -L are also undocumented, like -P. > Given the large set of changes, and the likely use of -P and -L in scripts, > I expect that the first deprecation step should just warn on stderr and > continue, > rather than having a fatal error. I don't think that would be good. A warning is too easily overlooked. When a user has overlooked the warning, the change in semantics will hit him just a like a silent change. And I don't think many people use these options -P, -H, -L: They are undocumented. > and probably --speed-large-files should be removed from the documentation > too (though still a no-op for backward compatibility). Really?? --speed-large-files is essential for users who need to reduce the running time from O(N²) to O(N). When you diff files of 100 MB or so, it becomes important. > As far as the long option names go, the GNU utilities aren't > consistent here, but perhaps we should use this for diffutils: > > -P == --no-dereference (as in cp, du) > -H == --dereference-command-line (as in ls) > -L == --dereference (as in cp, du, ls, stat) > > omitting the short options for now, as the old meanings are being deprecated. I agree. Can I commit the --no-dereference patch and leave the rest to you? Find attached the updated proposals. Bruno
0001-New-option-no-dereference.patch
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0002-Deprecate-old-option-P.patch
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0003-Deprecate-old-option-H.patch
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0004-Deprecate-old-option-L.patch
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