Re: Bison 3.5.93 released [beta]

[Frank Heckenbach]

Akim Demaille wrote:

> First, it was my understanding that diff was supposed to compare
> text files, which, for me, meant ignoring the difference between
> DOS-EOL and Unix-EOL.  The Autoconf documentation reads:
> 
> `cmp'
>      `cmp' performs a raw data comparison of two files, while `diff'
>      compares two text files.  Therefore, if you might compare DOS
>      files, even if only checking whether two files are different, use
>      `diff' to avoid spurious differences due to differences of newline
>      encoding.
> 
> So I believed merely using 'diff' sufficed.  I can confirm that on
> this macOS box, GNU diff does not ignore the difference between \r\n
> and \n, unless I pass the --strip-trailing-cr option.

FYI, I see the same behaviour on Linux. I suppose the intention is
to compare according to what the local system considers "text
files", i.e. \n on Unix/Mac, and either \n or \r\n on DOS/Windows.

So the Autoconf documentation should probably be read in this
context, though it certainly could be clearer on that.

Regards,
Frank