Linda B <taxlady@iglide.net> wrote:
> I hate to sound stupid, but what's a diff?
Hey, I've come to accept that most people on this list are complete
computer illiterates.
The "diff" program is part of the basic Unix textprocessing toolchest.
It compares two text files and outputs a description of their
differences, a "delta" or in this context a "diff". There is also
a corresponding "patch"[1] program that can take a diff and merge those
changes into a file.
Diffs are interesting in that they are both data files intended for
processing by a program, as well as text intended for human
consumption. People can look at the diff and evaluate the changes
before applying them. The exchange of diffs is central to Open
Source software development. As an OpenBSD developer, I send and
receive diffs all the time.
[1] While "diff" has been around forever, "patch" was later written
by Larry Wall, who is widely known as the creator of the Perl
language. "patch" is arguably a much greater contribution, since
it became a core infrastructure component that enabled distributed
collaborative software development over the early net.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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