Re: [platform-testers] groff 1.23.0.rc3 on Alpine Linux

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Bruno,

Thanks for testing yet another host configuration!

At 2023-03-06T02:00:41+0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> On Alpine Linux 3.14 the build works fine, but there is one test
> failure:
> 
> FAIL: contrib/gdiffmk/tests/runtests.sh
> 
> Find attached the log file. The cause is apparently that the 'diff'
> program on this platform is not GNU diff, but diff from BusyBox. See:
> 
> $ diff --version
> diff: unrecognized option: version
> BusyBox v1.33.1 () multi-call binary.
> 
> Usage: diff [-abBdiNqrTstw] [-L LABEL] [-S FILE] [-U LINES] FILE1 FILE2

Yes.  Amusingly enough, GNU diffutils 3.9 doesn't work either (it
managed to break the -D option, upon which gdiffmk strongly depends).

I'm on the fence about just documenting this as a known failure along
the lines of the existing GNU diffutils 3.9 caveat, or trying to have
the test script parse the diagnostic output of "diff" to decide whether
it can skip the test.

When people replace a GNU userland with a deliberately less featureful
one like BusyBox (or ToyBox, or some other copyleft-allergic
initiative), they have to be prepared for some reduction in
functionality.  A smaller memory footprint usually means fewer features.
And every freedom has a price, including the freedom to extract
unbounded economic rents via government-backed monopoly schemes.

Regards,
Branden

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