[Bug 735675] Re: bzdiff does not pass -I option to diff

[Ben Hutchings]

This patch is broken:

1. $OPTIONS is used (unquoted) in 4 different places but this patch only updates one of them
2. Quoting $OPTIONS prevents use of multiple options

Unfortunately I don't see a reasonable way to fix this while using only
POSIX shell features.

- If bzdiff is changed to use bash then the options can be accumulated into an array variable.  This would be fine in Debian and Ubuntu, but not upstream.
- POSIX allows positional arguments to be used in an array-like way, but we already use them for the filenames.
- This could be done by escaping, quoting and concatenating the options and then using eval to expand to multiple arguments.  But this is not what I would consider reasonable!

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Title:
  bzdiff does not pass -I option to diff

Status in bzip2 package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: bzip2

  When trying to use bzdiff with the -I option (ignore regex), the
  options are not properly passed to diff. I have 2 files (MySQL dumps)
  that differ in only one line:

  $ bzdiff tmp1.bz2 tmp2.bz2 
  9c9
  < -- Dump completed on 2011-03-11  1:06:50
  ---
  > -- Dump completed on 2011-03-11  0:40:11

  However, when trying to avoid that line from matching a problem
  arises:

  $ ./bzdiff_orig -I'Dump completed' tmp1.bz2 tmp2.bz2 
  diff: extra operand `/tmp/bzdiff.JnwGRlHnMM'
  diff: Try `diff --help' for more information.

  After some attempts at quoting and unquoting, I solved the problem by
  modifying the bzdiff shell script at /bin/bzdiff.

  The issues were 2: i) the options were not correctly parsed, a space
  was added before the first option, and ii) the options were not passed
  quoted to diff, therefore they were incorrectly interpreted as a file
  and not an option. Will include a patch.

  Version info:
  $ lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 10.10

  
  $ apt-cache policy bzip2
  bzip2:
    Installed: 1.0.5-4ubuntu1

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