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From: NU013809@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Greg Wettstein)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: RCS - was: Re: GNU diff for MSDOS
Message-ID: <4339NU013809@NDSUVM1>
Date: 20 Jul 90 14:40:03 GMT
References: <1990Jul13.181022.2792@cc.ic.ac.uk> <886@lee.SEAS.UCLA.EDU> <WRVMHMX@drivax.UUCP>
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I don't know about the rest of the group but I would think that everyone
would appreciate at least the posting of the executable to this group.

On a related note.  I packaged up my port of Version 1.7 of GNU DIFF and
shipped it off to Mr. Davidsen yesterday.  Hopefully if all is in order it
will be processed into the newsgroup in due time.  As I mentioned in the
accompanying documentation Version 1.7 is a little older than the 1.14 which
was posted elsewhere but this one is completely clean as far as I have been
able to test it.

I use it extensively and it has no problems either with diff'ing two
directories or with handling files larger than 65Kbytes.  As to the memory
usage required by diff this can be a problem although I have diff'ed two
files of around 200,000 bytes each with minimal difficulties.  Problems
usually begin to arise when two directories are diff'ed against one another.

Ever since I have been looking at GNU DIFF there has been an option to use
disk rather than main memory to hold the files being differenced.  Probably
in this day and age of large virtual memories there has not been enough
incentive for anyone to work out the code modifications necessary to do
this.  If someone was really interested in a spare time project (which we
all have so much of) adding this as an extension to the currently active
ports would enhance the usefulness of the utility greatly.

After GNU DIFF clears the newsgroup I will package up the port of GNU Make
for MS-DOS and ship it to the moderator.  I will follow that with GNU sed,
GNU tar and if there is interest GNU grep.  Hopefully everyone will find
them as useful as I have.

As always,
Dr. G.W. Wettstein

`The truest mark of a man's wisdom is his ability to listen to other men
expound their wisdom.'