[cmake-developers] [CMake 0013007]: "cmake -E compare_files" needs an option to ignore line endings

[Mantis Bug Tracker]

The following issue has been SUBMITTED. 
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http://public.kitware.com/Bug/view.php?id=13007 
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Reported By:                Daniel R. Gomez
Assigned To:                
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Project:                    CMake
Issue ID:                   13007
Category:                   CMake
Reproducibility:            always
Severity:                   feature
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     new
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Date Submitted:             2012-03-01 17:29 EST
Last Modified:              2012-03-01 17:29 EST
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Summary:                    "cmake -E compare_files" needs an option to ignore
line endings
Description: 
"cmake -E compare_files" is currently the equivalent of cmp(1), in that it
checks whether or not two files are bit-for-bit identical. If you compare two
text files that are the same except for one having Unix/LF line endings and the
other having DOS/CRLF line endings, compare_files will indicate that they are
different.

This behavior is not helpful when the files are unavoidably going to differ in
EOL convention. In my case, I have a CMake framework to build a text-processing
tool that is native to Unix, but is also usable in Windows. There is a test
suite, in which the tool generates textual output, and the output is compared to
a reference file. On Windows, the tool necessarily outputs CRLF text. But the
test-reference files are necessarily LF, because they were produced on Unix,
where the tool is maintained.

Currently, I am using CONFIGURE_FILE() as an improvised way of converting the
tool-output file from CRLF to LF so that compare_files can work as intended, and
the test suite gives meaningful results. However, this won't work if the file
happens to contain "${VAR}" and "@VAR@" constructs, and while COPYONLY would be
safer, it is not compatible with the necessary NEWLINE_STYLE directive.

What is really needed is an option to compare_files that tells it to compare the
two files as text, disregarding any differences in the line-ending convention.
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Issue History 
Date Modified    Username       Field                    Change               
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2012-03-01 17:29 Daniel R. GomezNew Issue                                    
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