Bug 15640

Summary: diff -r without -N produces misleading results
Product: Busybox Reporter: Yuri Kanivetsky <yuri.kanivetsky>
Component: OtherAssignee: unassigned
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: normal CC: busybox-cvs
Priority: P5    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Host: Target:
Build:

Description Yuri Kanivetsky 2023-06-18 17:47:54 UTC 
The following commit:

https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=75703eb8d5bd0d8d9ef0a8abaf25b421ca668ab5

makes diff not recurse into dirs which do not exist on the "other side." Which gives a false sense that what differs is only what is reported. You should at least give some warning, I believe.

Also the following comment

https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=f18a82d9b320146e367217aba6664b1efb1be68c

Initially I thought that diffutils skips such dirs too, but apparently it doesn't.

I'm running busybox-1.36.0, just in case. It's not in the list of the versions.