Bug#884095: flag to force file types

[Chris Lamb]

severity 884095 wishlist
thanks

Hi hc,

> Something like --force=apk would solve both.

So, I'm a little nervous about introducing such a directive.

This is primarily in terms that diffoscope should really just Do The
Right Thing by default in all cases and not need magic flags to get a
the desired result. :)

This is just a better user experience but also has real practical
implications; it is not tidy (or even possible) to specify such flags
in automated or hosted CI environments such as tests.reproducible-builds.org, try.diffoscope.org. Travis CI, etc. on a per-package basis.

Whilst we might have other flags that you could point to that would
violate this informal "rule", I would certainly cheer their removal.

(There are also — entirely secondary — concerns around whether this
flag would change the behaviour in nested files as well, but we can
leave that for now..)

Have we really exhausted the detection route for this? :)


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
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