Re: Bug#570064: diffutils 2.9 breaks dpkg-dev

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Raphael, this is the NEWS entry for the change:

* Diff now simply prints "Files A and B differ" instead of "Binary
  files A and B differ".  The message is output if either A or B
  appears to be a binary file, and the old wording was misleading
  because it implied that both files are binary, which is not
  necessarily the case.

Apparently, diff will show "Files A and B differ" only when at least
one of them is binary, so the "meaning" is the same as before.

My suggestion to avoid data loss would be something like this:

Files A and B differ and at least one of them is binary.

However, as long as the "meaning" is the same (upstream could confirm this)
even if the message is not changed again, I think it should be quite
easy to adapt dpkg-dev to the new behaviour if it's kept that way.


Let's see what upstream think about this.