Question

I'm hitting the binary save problem described in BinaryFileProblem, BinaryFilesDifferMessage, SaveErrorWhenAttachingBinaryFile. However, I've installed GNU rcs and diffutils and made sure the GNU diff is linked into the ci, rcs, etc. Testenv is happy with the diff version.

The first case is that diffutils-2.8.1 returns error status 2 if binary files differ, which causes ci to die. The behavior of diff on binary files was changed between 2.7 and 2.8.1:

$ diffutils-2.7/diff /bin/ls /bin/cat ; echo $?
Binary files /bin/ls and /bin/cat differ
1
$ diffutils-2.8.1/src/diff /bin/ls /bin/cat ; echo $?
Binary files /bin/ls and /bin/cat differ
2

The second case is that with diffutils-2.7 and rcs-5.7, ci dies, but with a slightly different message:

ci: /export/home/n1doc/pub/Sandbox/WebHome/davis-ant.zip,v: bad diff output line: Binary files - and /tmp/T2ckaa.y differ

So, what versions of diffutils and rcs do people actually have working together to allow checking in multiple revisions of binary files? The combinations I tried both fail, but in different ways.

Environment

-- KenShirriff - 08 Aug 2003

Answer

Ok, I figured out the problem. If you compile RCS (using the default Solaris diff), and then recompile to use the GNU diff, without running "configure" again, the compile options from configure are set based on Solaris diff, not GNU diff. In particular, the DIFFFLAGS are -n, not -an; the -a "treat all files as text" flag is required for RCS to work with binary files. (Maybe testenv could be enhanced to try doing ci on two different binary files to make sure the rcs/diff code works correctly?)

-- KenShirriff - 08 Aug 2003

Thanks for letting us know.

-- PeterThoeny - 09 Aug 2003

I've added a pointer to this from TWikiOnSolaris.

-- RichardDonkin - 10 Aug 2003