Status of BSD Diff replacement?

[Gabor Kovesdan]

On 2012.04.17. 23:03, Matthew Story wrote:
> Just wondering what the current status is on a BSD diff replacement. 
>  The IdeasPage suggests that a goodly amount of work was done on this 
> for GSoC 2010 
> (http://wiki.freebsd.org/IdeasPage#BSD-licensed_Text-Processing_Tools), but 
> the GPLinBase page says it's unowned and suggests replacement with 
> OpenBSD diff (http://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase).
Unless OpenBSD folks have changed or developed something, our incomplete 
BSD diff is OpenBSD diff + improvements.
>
> Wondering how much is outstanding on this, and where to start reading 
> to catch up on what's been done?

I worked a bit on that in 2008 along with grep and sort but these got 
more priorities so lots of features are still missing. Then Ben Fiedler 
also worked on it in 2010 but I don't exactly know what he accomplished 
and whether he took my code or chose another way. So for someone who 
wants to work on it, first it should be checked what's done, maybe merge 
my version and Ben's version, check whether OpenBSD added something new 
or fixed somethings and then implement missing features and do lots of 
testing to ensure compatibility with GNU diff. And performance tests and 
improvements if necessary.

I work on grep/regex related things and recently Oleg Moskalenko took 
over my incomplete BSD sort code but noone is working on BSD diff so any 
contribution is very welcome.

Gabor