Re: [Tools-discuss] rfcdiff lies

[Henrik Levkowetz <henrik at levkowetz.com>]

Hi Carsten,

On 2009-09-21 14:00 Carsten Bormann said the following:
> I just had an interesting encounter with rfcdiff, more precisely with
> 
> http://tools.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-6lowpan-nd-05.txt

<snip details showing erroneous display of whitespace change>

Ugh.  Not good.

> I was just about to file the defect report on -05...
> 
> Whitespace *is* significant in RFC box notation!
> 
> Even if the change is not color-coded (which would probably be hard to  
> do in general for whitespace-only changes), the right column should  
> get its content from the actual file, not from the "unchanged"  
> contents of the left column.

Agreed.

> Until then, I'll triple-check my box notation from the original files.

I've made an experimental update of rfcdiff which doesn't consider white-
space significant when looking for changes in general.  Doing this only
for artwork requires a major re-write of the tool, so I'm looking for
workable solutions which require somewhat less work.

The URL above should now show the whitespace change faithfully, with
color-coding.  The drawback is that whitespace changes will be shown
throughout the file.  I don't really know if that is a problem with
today's draft-production tools, though.

Feedback on this would be appreciated.


Regards,

	Henrik

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