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Problems with telnetlib

François Pinard pinard at iro.umontreal.ca
Sun Feb 17 19:21:05 EST 2002 
[Tim Peters]

> [Bengt Richter]

> > BTW, why are context diffs preferred over unified?

> Because Guido says so.

So, Guido and Richard (Stallman) agree on this one! :-)

I became a bit tired of having to remember the preference of each maintainer.
In my experience, many maintainers, if not most of them, prefer unified.

> OTOH, the opposite seems true more often to me when looking at simple
> patches.

Probably most maintainers prefer simpler patches then, or write code for
which patches are simpler on average! :-)

> Someone should write a tool to generate both patch flavors, compare them,
> and objectively determine which is clearer.  Indeed, I demand someone
> do this at once <wink>.

Someone contributed `unify.[1c]', which I planned to integrate in `wdiff'
as at the time, as the `diffutils' maintainer was just not receptive to
this contribution.  Richard told me that `wdiff' should get integrated into
`diffutils'.  I do not know exactly what will happen nor how it will happen,
but surely, nothing happened in years.

I bent `unify' to GNU standards and made it part of some `wdiff' pretest,
a long while ago.  It should be easy to transmit separately to whoever
asks, I guess.  This tool converts between unidiffs and context diffs.
This should help maintainers having preferences at staying happy, without
having to fight or burden all contributors with their own little tastes
and distastes.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
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