[diffoscope] Diffoscope falls back to xxd for two (seemingly) text files with identical content

Aman Sharma amansha at kth.se
Tue Feb 18 18:35:44 UTC 2025


Hi,


I am comparing two text files `ref` and `reb`. These are originally from reference<https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/royale/compiler/debugger/0.9.7/debugger-0.9.7.jar> and rebuild version of `org.apache.royale.compiler:debugger:0.9.7`. These files are packaged in the jar. When I run diffoscope over the JAR files, I see that there is a size difference in these text files.


--rw-r--r-- 2.0 unx 35171 b- defN 00-Jan-01 00:00 royale/tools/debugger/cli/fdbhelp_nl.txt
+-rw-r--r-- 2.0 unx 33417 b- defN 00-Jan-01 00:00 royale/tools/debugger/cli/fdbhelp_nl.txt


Running diffoscope 288 over these two files (also attached) returns:

```

...

-00008930: 6174 2074 6865 206e 6578 742d 746f 2d6c  at the next-to-l
-00008940: 6173 7420 6f6e 6520 6973 2070 6172 7365  ast one is parse
-00008950: 6420 7072 6f70 6572 6c79 2e20 2929 290d  d properly. ))).
-00008960: 0a0d 0a                                  ...
+00001340: 656b 696e 6773 7075 6e74 206f 7020 6465  ekingspunt op de
+00001350: 2068 7569 6469 6765 2072 6567 656c 2075   huidige regel u
+00001360: 6974 2068 6574 2068 7569 6469 6765 200a  it het huidige .
...
```

The difference between them is also documented here<https://github.com/jvm-repo-rebuild/reproducible-central/blob/master/content/org/apache/royale/compiler/royale-maven-plugin-0.9.7.diffoscope#L921-L975>. This is quite strange as the diff is not clear at all. The content seems to be identical. My VSCode does not show a difference in the new line so I am bit confused where the difference is coming from 😅 It is also very strange that filetype is data. Now there are two things that I need help with:

  1.  What is the difference? There has to be as sizes are different.
  2.  Can we show it in a better way in diffoscope?


Regards,
Aman Sharma

PhD Student
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
Department of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS)
<http://www.kth.se><https://www.kth.se/profile/amansha><https://www.kth.se/profile/amansha>
<https://www.kth.se/profile/amansha>https://algomaster99.github.io/
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