[bug-diffutils] Bug#680990: Diff does not show BOM difference. (fwd)

[Santiago Vila]

Hello.

I received this report from the Debian bug system.
The full log for this bug may be found here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=680990

but it includes a long discussion between the submitter and myself
which I'll try to summarize here for brevity.

In the first place, the submitter complains that whenever two files
are diffed, one containing a BOM and another one not containing a BOM,
the BOM itself is not clearly visible in the diff, which might make
the user a little bit puzzled.

My reply to this is that the BOM is invisible, like spaces, and diff
is not to blame for that.

The submitter then complains that if BOM is not visible but a text file
with BOM is "equivalent" to the same text without BOM, then it would
make sense for "diff -w" to discard differences based on BOM presence.

Another suggestion from the submitter is that diff could show a message
similar to "\ No newline at end of file" when the difference is based
on presence/lack of BOM.

Thanks.