GNU wdiff

GNU wdiff is a front-end to diff for comparing files on a word per word basis. A word is anything between whitespace. This is useful for comparing two texts in which a few words have been changed and for which paragraphs have been refilled. It works by creating two temporary files, one word per line, and then executes diff on these files. It collects the diff output and uses it to produce a nicer display of word differences between the original files.

What is new in this release:

• We now have translations for Esperanto. There were also updates for many others: Czech, German, Spanish, Finnish, Galician, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Updates to translations became neccessary due to a recent bug fix, but many of these updates contained a number of improvements besides that required change.
• This release uses more recent versions of autotools and gnulib. The former avoids a security vulnerability in some dist* targets, and both might help portability of this package.
• In case you wonder about the version number: the 1.2.0 release was a beta intended only for translators.
• There were no modifications to the core code of the application.

What is new in version 1.1.2:

• This new release so shortly after the 1.1.1 release aims to fix a build-time issue due to the removal of the gets function from the C language in the C11 standard. Praveen Kumar reported that this currently prevents bundling for Fedora. The fix is a backport of a single gnulib changeset.
• As the fix only changes compile-time behaviour and the version number, there is no urgend need for packagers to update to 1.1.2 if they were able to build 1.1.1 all right. Unless their users complain about the outdated version number, that is.

What is new in version 1.1.0:

• Translations can now make use of plural forms. While this means a drastic improvement for some languages, it may also mean that some languages for which no such plural forms are available yet might be lacking user visible message strings, not only error messages, but also for e.g. statistics. You might want to check the translation status if your users have problems with English.
• Other changes center around the use of pagers. We no longer auto-detect whether the output pager is less. If it is, it will now receive its arguments from the environment, not the command line. As we now pass console control sequences to less, instead of some simulated overstriking, it should be better at handling multibyte encodings like UTF-8. This hopefully fixes Savannah bug #34224. The old "--less-mode" is still available if explicitely selected.
• The test suite used to test pagers had some portability problems, causing the tests (particularly the one using screen) to fail. This should be fixed now. If you encounter any errors, please contact the developers or file a bug report on Savannah.

What is new in version 1.0.1:

• For another 15 languages, wdiff does install only a rather rudimentary set of translations. But even for those languages, a large number of "fuzzy" translations are available, which should only require minor checks and adjustments to cover a large percentage of the translatable messages. If you are interested in helping translations, please coordinate your work with the translation project.

What is new in version 0.6.5:

• This release never initializes or deinitializes terminals, as wdiff doesn't do cursor movement. As a consequence, the --no-init-term (-K) command line has been deprecated, although it's still accepted for backwards compatibility. It now has the same function as the --terminal (-t) option.
• The release also fixes a bug causing relative paths to appear in the command name in the man pages. The gnulib parts have been updated as well, which might be particularly important for uClibc users.

What is new in version 0.6.4:

• This release includes updated Italian and Swedish translations.

What is new in version 0.6.3:

• This release includes updated Italian and Swedish translations.

What is new in version 0.6.2:

• This release fixes a shell syntax error in the configure script which cause build errors on some platforms.
• An update of gnulib import along with various improvements indicated by its maint.mk syntax checks should improve portability even further.

What is new in version 0.6.1:

• This release fixes a bug with the info directory information, reported by Gentoo at http://bugs.gentoo.org/312319 and causing error messages from install-info: START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY without matching END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
• It also introduces a new configure switch, --with-default-pager=PATH, allowing the specification of a fallback pager application to be used for --auto-pager mode if the PAGER environment variable is unset.
• Furthermore, if the pager is a symlink to less, that fact is now detected and causes automatic activation of --less-mode. In 0.6.0 less was auto-detected only if the pager was no symlink, or if the symlink itself was called less as well.