Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!morgan.com!jordan
From: jordan@morgan.com (Jordan Hayes)
Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug
Subject: Re: 8bit files in RCS
Message-ID: <9001162240.AA20310@Morgan.COM>
Date: 16 Jan 90 22:40:37 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
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	>>> Are you volunteering to provide patches or work on it (:-)

Yes.

Ok, here goes:

GNU diff can do the trick.  However, you have to supply the -a flag for
it to believe (even in the face of 8bit characters) that it's text and
not a binary.  I hardcoded this option into our version (-a now
reverses this option) and installed in /usr/local/bin ...

RCS sets the variable DIFF to "/bin/diff" so I just set it to "diff"
and reinstalled.  This seems to work (at least it does for me ...).

Possible other solution -- set DIFF = "diff -a" and skip the hardcoded
option ... not sure if you exec or parse the args or what, so I didn't
bother with that.

For the GNU folks: I have 1.12 of gdiff; is there a reason why -a isn't
the default?  Is this to keep backwards compatability?  What would be a
better way to solve this?

/jordan