Re: Bug#321036: diff -L undocumented in --help and man page (fwd)

[Fabian Pietsch]

> There is some sentiment to deprecate -L, since it's not designed well.
> So I'd rather remove it from all the documentation.  (It would be
> replaced with a better mechanism.)

Personally I'd prefer to have -L documented (but marked as deprecated),
as otherwise it can be difficult to understand how complex scripts work
that are using diff -L.

Particularly it took some time for me to figure out how dpkg-source
(implemented as Perl script) creates diffs with "short" headers (i.e.,
without time stamps) by using diff. It seemed there was no diff option
to do that, but dpkg-source didn't postprocess the diff output, either.

As -L was undocumented (in a default Debian diff install) and unknown to
me, it was quite non-obvious that dpkg-source "fakes" the source and
destination file names using -L, thereby suppressing diff's timestamp
output.