[announce] diffoscope 144 released

[Chris Lamb]

Dear all,

The diffoscope maintainers are please to announce the release of
version 145 of diffoscope.

diffoscope tries to get to the bottom of what makes files or
directories different. It will recursively unpack archives of many
kinds and transform various binary formats into more human readable
form to compare them. It can compare two tarballs, ISO images, or PDF
just as easily.

Version 145 includes the following changes:

  [ Chris Lamb ]
  
  * Improvements:

    - Print the amount of free space that we have available in our temporary
      directory as a debugging message.
    - Remove (broken) fuzzy matching of JSON files as file 5.35 (in buster,
      released 2018-10-18) supports recognising JSON data.
      (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#106)
    - Don't pretty-print the JSON output by default as it will usually be so
      complicated to be unreadable by the human eye and it can be easily
      replaced by piping to "| jq".
    - Don't print a traceback if we pass a single, missing argument to
      diffoscope (eg. a JSON diff to re-load).

  * Reporting/output improvements:

    - Reduce the default number of maximum standard error lines printed from 50
      to 25; usually the error is obvious by that point.
    - Clarify the message when we truncate the number of lines to standard error.
    - Clarify when an external command emits for both files, otherwise it can
      look like diffoscope is repeating itself when it is actually being run
      twice.
    - Don't repeat "stderr from {}" if both commands emit the same thing.

  * Dockerfile improvements:

    - Use ARG instead of ENV for DEBIAN_FRONTEND so we do not set this
      environment variable at runtime.
      (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#103)
    - Run diffoscope as a non-root user in the runtime container.
      (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#102)
    - Add a .dockerignore file to whitelist files we need in our container.
      Thanks to Emanuel Bronshtein for the original idea.
      (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#105)
    - Install/remove the build-essential package during build so we can install
      the recommended packages from Git.

  * Testsuite improvements:

    - Include the Black output in the assertion failure too.
    - Update the Black self-test; we don't care about the length of the black
      output, rather whether it has some or, preferably, not.

  * Codebase improvements:

    - Bump the officially required version of Python from 3.5 to 3.6.
      (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#117)
    - Drop an unused shlex import.
    - Instruct linters to pass over a bare try-except when cleaning up
      temporary files used to extract archives.
    - Format diffoscope/comparators/utils/command.py according to Black 19.10b0-3.
    - Drop entries from Uploaders that have not uploaded in over three years
      with esteemed thanks for their previous work.
    - Drop .travis.yml; we are using Salsa now and likely would not give
      support for running on Travis CI at this point.

  [ Jelle van der Waa ]
  * Update LLVM diff for LLVM version 10.

  [ Vagrant Cascadian ]
  * Add external tool reference on openssl for GNU Guix.


## Download

Version 145 is available from Debian unstable as well as PyPI, and
will shortly be available on other platforms surely. More details can
be found here:

   https://diffoscope.org/

… but source tarballs may be located here:

  https://diffoscope.org/archive/

## Contribute

diffoscope is developed within the "Reproducible builds" effort.

  - Git repository
    https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/diffoscope

  - Issues and feature requests
    https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/diffoscope/issues

  - Contribution instructions (eg. to file an issue)
    https://reproducible-builds.org/contribute/salsa/



Regards,

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