Package: diffutils
Version: 1:3.10-1build1
Severity: wishlist
This form allows me to use a program to compare 2 files and use sdiff to
format the results:
sdiff --diff-program=PROGRAM ...
What I *really* want to do is define my own line-wise comparison,
though, so "sdiff" will show lines as matching if the approximately
match in a way I specify.
Allowing me to pass positional arguments to the comparator would give me
flexibility without having to write a unique comparator program for each
case.
Here are two examples:
sdiff --comparator-program=prefix --comparator-arg="5" ...
sdiff --comparator-program=field --comparator-arg='\d+ (\d+) .*'
--comparator-arg='\d+ \d+ (\d+) .*' ...
The first case would match the first 5 characters of each line. The
second case would match numbers in the second column of the first line
with the third column of the second line.
Note that "sdiff" doesn't have to process these arguments, it just
passes them verbatim as positional-parameters to the comparator program,
along with the 2 lines being compared.
The comparator programs would just be executables, written any way
that's convenient.
