The reason for -u diffs is for their human readability factor. When you post a patch to a mailing list, people usually skim them over (looking for obvious mistakes) before applying them to their source tree. The +/- syntax (and context) make it very easy to mentally understand the changeset. The big blocks of ! or ">" and "<" aren't so easy to grok. (Although obviously patch has no problem either way, so if you're a security-through-obscurity web framework developer distributing some s00per sekr3t security updates, you'd probably choose the less-readable format over ones that people could actually understand.)
Also, I think the laziness factor comes in to play, as well. svn diff and cvs diff both produce unified diffs by default. Less typing is good :) Regards, Jonathan Rockway > These were diff -c, which patch(1) is happy with. Can you tell me what format > (in diff(1)) you're refering to? >
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