Port of OpenBSD's sdiff

[Steven Kreuzer]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 11:57:27PM +0200, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:
> Steven Kreuzer escribi?:
> >Greetings-
> >
> >OpenBSD includes a version of sdiff released to the public domain.
> >In a quest to remove as much GPL code from FreeBSD as possible, I
> >ported it over.
> >
> >If you want to try it out, You can download the source at
> >http://www.exit2shell.com/~skreuzer/code/sdiff.tar.gz
> >
> >I had a few people who are part of the NYC BSD Users Group beta 
> >test it for me and so far no one has encountered any problems so 
> >I thought I would pass it along to see if it would be considered 
> >as a replacement for the GNU version.
> >
> >The contents of the tarball is a shar archive which extracts the 
> >code in usr/src/usr.bin/sdiff and a patch the adds adds "sdiff" 
> >to SUBDIR in the Makefile in usr.bin and removes "sdiff" from the 
> >Makefile in gnu/usr.bin
> >
> >Questions, comments and criticisms are all welcome.
> >
> >  
> Hello Steven,
> 
> these are very good news! You might also want to take a look at 
> textproc/bsddiff, textproc/bsdgrep and textproc/bsdsort. These are the 
> BSD-licensed text processing tools from OpenBSD, as well, but I haven't 
> looked at sdiff, yet, thus I can only tell about the former 3 ones. If 
> we change to those, we should make sure, that they are compatible with 
> the GNU versions as much as they can be. Thus we might need a bit of 
> feature completion there. For example, we should check if the long 
> command line options are available there, too. For diff, grep and sort, 
> there are some of those, but they are undocumented in the manual page, 
> so we have to complete the manpages, too. Now I'm busy with SoC and 
> other high priority tasks, but if I have some time, I'll take a look as 
> I'm also interested in getting these completed.

I am pretty sure it is compatiable with the GNU version of sdiff, 
but I will take a closer look to make sure. One thing worth 
noting, which was brought up on the NYCBUG mailing list is that 
--help is missing

Ray Lai, who is the original author of this, responded with:

"I don't really like the GNU-style --help/--version stuff.  I'd
rather improve the man pages instead of trying to keep two 
different manuals."

I think he makes a pretty good point, but if you guys think this 
should be available, I could hack it in.

Also, I am going to run some tests to make sure that there is no  
regression with mergemaster

-- Steven Kreuzer
http://www.exit2shell.com/~skreuzer