GNU diff utilities - News: diffutils-3.4 released [stable]

diffutils-3.4 released [stable]

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Mon 08 Aug 2016 06:10:12 PM UTC.

This is to announce diffutils-3.4, a stable release.

There have been 60 commits by 7 people in the 3.5 years since 3.3.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Andreas Grünbacher (1)
  Giuseppe Scrivano (5)
  Glenn Morris (1)
  Jim Meyering (30)
  KO Myung-Hun (2)
  Paul Eggert (20)
  Stefano Lattarini (1)

Special thanks to Giuseppe Scrivano for the new colorized-output option
and to Paul Eggert for numerous bug fixes and improvements.

Jim [on behalf of the diffutils maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU diffutils home page:
    http://gnu.org/s/diffutils/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=diffutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v3.4
or run this command from a git-cloned diffutils directory:
  git shortlog v3.3..v3.4

To summarize the 987 gnulib-related changes, run these commands
from a git-cloned diffutils directory:
  git checkout v3.4
  git submodule summary v3.3

==================================================================
Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-3.4.tar.xz
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-3.4.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/diffutils/diffutils-3.4.tar.xz
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/diffutils/diffutils-3.4.tar.xz.sig

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify diffutils-3.4.tar.xz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.69.147-5ad35
  Automake 1.99a
  Gnulib v0.1-820-ge4f1a4a

==================================================================
NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 3.4 (2016-08-08) [stable]

** New features

   diff accepts two new options --color and --palette to generate
   and configure colored output.  --color takes an optional argument
   specifying when to colorize a line: --color=always, --color=auto,
   --color=never.  --palette is used to configure which colors are used.

** Bug fixes

  When binary files differ, diff now exits with status 1 as POSIX requires.
  Formerly it exited with status 2.

  Unless the --ignore-file-name-case option is used, diff now
  considers file names to be equal only if they are byte-for-byte
  equivalent.  This fixes a bug where diff in an English locale might
  consider two Asian file names to be the same merely because they
  contain no English characters.

  diff -B no longer generates incorrect output if the two inputs
  each end with a one-byte incomplete line.

  diff --brief no longer reports a difference for unusual identical files.
  For example, when comparing a file like /proc/cmdline (for which the linux
  kernel reports st_size of 0 even though it is not an empty file) to a
  copy of that file's contents residing on a "normal" file system:
    $ f=/proc/cmdline; cp $f k; diff --brief $f k
    Files /proc/cmdline and k differ

** Performance changes

  diff's default algorithm has been adjusted to output higher-quality
  results at somewhat greater computational cost, as CPUs have gotten
  faster since the algorithm was last tweaked in diffutils-2.6 (1993).