RE: Unable to get any DIffs to work

["Rousell, Jeff" <jrousell@xxxxxxx>]

Solaris 8.

Adding GNU diffutils is an easy enough thing, but learning that you need
to wasn't all that simple, I can imagine a quick mention of that in the
INSTALL doc might help some.

Thanks again for your time!
Jeff


-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Noack [mailto:noackjr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 1:08 PM
To: Rousell, Jeff
Cc: freebsd-cvsweb@xxxxxxxxxxx; scop@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Unable to get any DIffs to work


Jonathan Noack wrote:
> Rousell, Jeff wrote:
>> I am unable to get any diff outputs to work with a new CVSWeb 
>> installation.
>>  
>> I  am NOT a newbie who is posting here without first trying to solve 
>> this myself.
>>  
>> The installation works perfectly for browsing and doing annotation 
>> outputs but not for any diffs.  rcsdiff and rlog ( 5.7) is installed 
>> and has been confirmed to work fine from the command line.
>> I am not getting not getting any 500 errors nor server error log info
>> about the problem.
>>  
>> For the human readable diff I basically get a blank diff -- the page 
>> looks fine with all eth header and footer prettiness- but the actual 
>> "meat" of the page says: " - No viewable change - "
>>  
>> If I try a unified or side-by-side I get something like below printed

>> to the browser( no header or footer prettiness):
>> /bin/diff: illegal option -- -
>> usage: diff [-bitw] [-c | -e | -f | -h | -n] file1 file2
>>        diff [-bitw] [-C number] file1 file2
>>        diff [-bitw] [-D string] file1 file2
>>        diff [-bitw] [-c | -e | -f | -h | -n] [-l] [-r] [-s] [-S name]

>> directory1 directory2
>> rcsdiff: /web-content/cvsroot/SCM/bin/jadd: diff failed
>> I am able to use rcsdiff from the command line just fine.  And it 
>> appears as though cvsweb.cgi has the  access to  run rcsdiff and 
>> knows where it is etc...
>> Is there a debug flag that I cna sue so that it prints out the full
diff
>> command that it is trying to perform so thhat I could verify that
fomr
>> teh command line?
> 
> Which OS?  Which version of CVSweb?  Can you post of a diff between
> cvsweb.conf.dist and your cvsweb.conf?
> 
> Uncommenting '$DEBUG = 1;' in cvsweb.conf will cause STDERR to be sent
> to your web server error log instead of /dev/null.  However, for the 
> rcsdiff command STDERR is sent to STDOUT by default so you are already

> seeing any errors in your web browser.
> 
> Attached is a patch for CVSweb 3.0.6 which will print out the rcsdiff
> command used.  It should print out at the top of the diff output.
> 
> One final note:
> When testing from the command-line be sure to run the command as the 
> web
> server user (i.e., 'sudo -u www rcsdiff ...').

Jeff sent me a message off-list that said he found that the problem was 
with an older Solaris version of diff (rcsdiff runs diff to perform the 
actual comparison).  Everything worked fine once he started using the 
GNU diffutils.

Jeff,
What version of Solaris are you running?

Ville,
Should we make a recommendation/requirement to use the GNU diffutils?

-Jonathan