I'm having some trouble diffing revisions of the Jargon File at the word level, because the formatting seems to be confusing git diff --word-diff. The diffs produced are far from minimal, or word diffs for that matter.
I've attached a pair of files that produces non-minimal output. The entire first paragraph of the diff is rewritten in the diff despite the fact that it is nearly identical across revisions. The word diff can be made sensible by removing the second blank line so that the term and definition are no longer in separate "paragraphs".
The behaviour persists whether I set the word regex to "[[:punct:]]+|[[:alnum:]]+" or use the default word regex.
IMO this behaviour is aberrant: whitespace is whitespace regardless of whether it constitutes a paragraph break or not. Is there a command line option, or specific way of phrasing the regex, that I'm missing, or is this a bug?
- Willow Liquorice
:Acme: n. The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and
non-functional gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson
(two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop.
The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company
Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears
Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an "Acme
X" either means "This is {insanely great}", or, more likely, "This
looks {insanely great} on paper, but in practice it's really easy to
shoot yourself in the foot with it." Compare {pistol}.This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of "Roadrunner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices - rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large cardboard boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme name. These devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.
:Acme: n.
[from Greek akme highest point of perfection or achievement] The
canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry
-- where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who
specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been
humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In
fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the
early 1900s.) Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means "This is
{insanely great}", or, more likely, "This looks {insanely great} on
paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot
with it." Compare {pistol}.This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of "Road-runner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Road-runner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices -- rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large wooden crates labeled prominently with the Acme name -- which, probably not by coincidence, was the trade name of a peg bar system for superimposing animation cels used by cartoonists since forever. Acme devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.