Re: Bug#206210: diff: does not comply with LSB 1.3 (fwd)

[Paul Eggert]

Santiago Vila <address@hidden> writes:

> Remember Debian Bug #184886? It's here again, and this time LSB-compliance
> seems to be a release goal for the next stable Debian release. What's
> the status of LSB-compliance for diffutils in your own sources?

As far as I know, diffutils 2.8.4 conforms to LSB 1.3 in this area.

I see there are several bug reports in this area, including 184885,
184886, 184887, 186140, 206210.  None of these reports explain explain
exactly why the relevant utilities don't conform: they just say "they
don't conform; there's a test suite that says so somewhere; here's a
patch".

The patches all have to do with multibyte handling, so I presume the
complaint is in that area.  However, POSIX does not require that
standard utilities must support multibyte locales.  I looked at LSB
1.3, and I don't see any extra requirement called out in this area.
Therefore, as far as I can tell LSB 1.3 does not require support for
multibyte locales either.  Multibyte support is optional.

Hence this is not a standards conformance issue, as far as I can see.

I'd very much like to add clean multibyte support to diffutils, but
the diffutils patch isn't acceptable for reasons already discussed.

I see that a similar bug report for coreutils (Debian bug 186140) has
been moved from "serious" to "wishlist", and I suggest that the other
standards-conformance bugs in this area be treated similarly.  I'll
CC: this message to the other bugs I've mentioned, to make sure we're
all on the same page (or at least, on compatible pages :-).