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Re: diff-mode misinterprets empty lines.
From: |
David Kastrup |
Subject: |
Re: diff-mode misinterprets empty lines. |
Date: |
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:12:29 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
> When people don't want trailing whitespace warnings to trigger in their
> editor, they should obviously amend diff-mode for that. But changing
> the diff format instead is insane. And that patch happens to have
> tolerance code intended to deal with utterly broken mailers is no excuse
> for that.
>
> Are you suggesting I should ask the diff maintainers to revert that
> change? That might be a good idea.
Personally, I would consider this a good idea. The "patch" program has
apparently been made robust in the presence of mail-mangled patches,
cut&paste carnage and other damage. But "patch works with it" is, in my
opinion, not a positive definition of the diff format (while "patch
fails" is a different issue): patch is not the only program working with
diffs, and some version control systems have a diff-based workflow
without using "patch" for it.
Here is the format definition actually delivered with diff itself for
context diffs:
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/manual/html_node/Detailed-Context.html#Detailed%20Context>
And here another for unified diffs:
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/manual/html_node/Detailed-Unified.html#Detailed%20Unified>
It appears quite definite from the description that no whitespace
reduction is intended, neither for content nor for formatting
characters.
So yes, I would ask the diff maintainers to revert the change. I can't
think of a good reason for it at all, but maybe they can, so it would
probably be a good idea to keep emacs-devel in the list (after all,
Emacs is one of the applications broken by this, for now): that way we
might together reach consensus on the best course.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum