[Reproducible-builds] Bug#772029: Bug#772029: debbindiff: please avoid hardcoded use of VIm

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Jérémy Bobbio (2014-12-04 16:15:02)
> > Jonas Smedegaard:
> >> I am not a VIm user, however, and its hardcoded use of that editor is
> >> strongly discouraging for me (no, I do not use emacs either).
> >>
> >> Please consider recoding¹ to not rely on VIm-specific features, to
> >> appeal also to users of other interactive editors.
> >
> > Feel free to provide another way to generate HTML diffs in a 
> > reasonable amount of time (Python html diff is out of the picture) 
> > which are readable. I've looked a bit before hacking the current 
> > solution and nothing worked out.
> 
> Thanks for the challenge! :-)

That's "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!" nowadays. ;-)

> If you have notes about the stuff you've already investigated (apart 
> from 
> http://technogems.blogspot.com/2011/09/generate-side-by-side-diffs-in-html.html 
> that I've already found in the README) then please do share.  Else I'll 
> try work from what I can guess based on current code.

I didn't test it, but there's also libhtml-diff-perl. Maybe that's of
use. There are also other not yet packaged perl modules with similar
functionality:

https://metacpan.org/pod/HTML::Differences
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::Diff::HTML
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::Diff::FormattedHTML

I actually already started to package Text::Diff::HTML a while ago
(https://bugs.debian.org/721245,
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-perl/attic/libtext-diff-html-perl.git)
as I expected that I'd need it. But then my usage case vanished. In
case of interest, I can resurrect that effort. (Or package any of the
other perl modules. I think Jonas would do that as well. :-)

> The issues I have are a) pulling in 28.8MB on my system, and b) 
> introducing an editor that messes with system priorities among editors.

Yeah, here, too...

		Regards, Axel
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