Up: Experimental [Contents]
Many users
suggested features, which were in turn inviting for the integration of
wdiff into GNU diffutils. Collaboration proved to be rather
difficult. After a few years, the wdiff author finally gave in
and created mdiff as a way to break out of the situation and for
becoming able to proceed with users’ suggestions.
Before mdiff and the new wdiff2 based on it were
officially released, the original author resigned maintainership.
The new maintainers had little experience with the code, and therefore
decided to mark it experimental. That way, the code wouldn’t be lost,
but it would be clear that it wasn’t as testes as the good old
wdiff command.