Re: diff -L undocumented in --help and man page

[Eric Blake]

On 12/30/2010 12:26 PM, Christoph Berg wrote:
>> diff -L is neither documented in --help nor in the man page.
>> It's documented in the info page that the man page refers to, but that's
>> part of diff-doc and not installed with diff by default.
>>
>> Once -L was documented in --help (and there was no own man page, but one
>> provided by the LDP that documented -L) in diff 2.7 (as distributed with
>> SuSE 6.4).

This is intentional.  Read the NEWS file:

User-visible changes in version 2.8:
* The following diff options are still accepted, but are no longer
documented.
  They may be withdrawn in future releases.
  -h (omit; it has no effect)
  -H (use --speed-large-files instead)
  -L (use --label instead)
  -P (use --unidirectional-new-file instead)
  --inhibit-hunk-merge (omit; it has no effect)

> 
> Hi,
> 
> as a further followup here: -L is used by "svn diff". It would be nice
> if it was mentioned in the manpage and --help output as an alternative
> to --label, even if that's deprecated. Having to dig into the source
> isn't that userfriendly...

'svn diff' should be patched to use --label rather than -L.  This is
because a future version of diff might be taught to treat -HLP in the
same manner as other recursive programs, such as chown, where -L affects
how symlinks are treated during recursion.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature