From: Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org>
To: Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>, Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Cc: bug-gnulib@gnu.org
Subject: Re: cmp/diff
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2020 14:31:39 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <70222086d33beef9332730746d67a16b9112c45b.camel@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4087542.9Ba499KVGE@omega>
On Sat, 2020-12-26 at 19:49 +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Makefile rules are written both for automated execution and for the
> developers of a package. While for the automated execution of a unit
> test, "cmp expected.out actual.out" is sufficient, for a developer,
> "diff expected.out actual.out" is definitely nicer.
Agreed.
It could be possible for the configure script to check for diff and if
it's not provided, replace it with cmp in situations where we only need
to care about equality for correct processing (which is most places).
A message could be shown to the user saying that without diff it will
be hard for maintainers to assist if the configure fails.
However, that seems like a lot of effort for not much gain (for the GNU
project) so I'd suggest that if someone wanted something like that they
would need to provide the implementation.
prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-12-26 19:31 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-26 16:24 cmp/diff Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list
2020-12-26 17:32 ` cmp/diff Bruno Haible
2020-12-26 18:34 ` cmp/diff Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list
2020-12-26 18:49 ` cmp/diff Bruno Haible
2020-12-26 19:12 ` cmp/diff Paul Eggert
2020-12-26 21:55 ` cmp/diff Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list
2020-12-26 23:12 ` cmp/diff Paul Eggert
2020-12-27 0:07 ` cmp/diff Alfred M. Szmidt
2020-12-27 0:23 ` cmp/diff Paul Eggert
2020-12-27 1:05 ` cmp/diff Alfred M. Szmidt
2020-12-27 0:07 ` cmp/diff Alfred M. Szmidt
2020-12-27 0:43 ` egrep, fgrep, and install-info Bruno Haible
2020-12-27 1:12 ` Alfred M. Szmidt
2020-12-26 19:31 ` Paul Smith [this message]
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