Bug#2312: Silly message from diff about fifos

[Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>]

I'm closing this bug report again.  The program is working as designed.
In particular, the program considers it an error to do a diff operation
on named pipes (fifos).  To me, this seems reasonable.

If you have a disagreement with the authors regarding this aspect of
their design, please take it up with them.  The upstream bug report
address is bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu.

On Sat, 4 May 1996, Ian Jackson wrote:

>Bill Mitchell writes ("Re: Bug#2312: Silly message from diff about fifos"):
>> I'm closing this bug report.
>
>Why ?
>
>> Here's the test I did to duplicate the problem:
>>
>> root:/root# diff -ru dpkg-1.1.5 duplicate
>> File dpkg-1.1.5/dselect/p is a fifo while file duplicate/dselect/p is a fifo
>
>Yes ... but the message shouldn't appear at all.  diff is supposed to
>report differences, and there is no difference here !
>
>You don't see it say
>  File spong is an empty file while file foo is an empty file
>do you ?
>
>I'm reopening the bug report.
>
>Thanks,
>Ian.
>
>> This message appears because of:
>>     root:/root# file dpkg-1.1.5/dselect/p duplicate/dselect/p
>>     dpkg-1.1.5/dselect/p: fifo (named pipe)
>>     duplicate/dselect/p:  fifo (named pipe)
>> and:
>>     fstat (f.desc, &f.stat)
>> and, later:
>>     if (S_ISFIFO (st->st_mode)) return "fifo";
>> and:
>>     message5 ("File %s is a %s while file %s is a %s\n", ...
>
>