---
layout: post
title: diffoscope 144 released
author: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>
---

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version `144`. This version includes the following changes:

```
[ Chris Lamb ]

* Improvements:

  - Print the amount of free space that we have available in our temporary
    directory as a debugging message.
  - Remove (broken) fuzzy matching of JSON files as file 5.35 (in buster,
    released 2018-10-18) supports recognising JSON data.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#106)
  - Don't pretty-print the JSON output by default as it will usually be so
    complicated to be unreadable by the human eye and it can be easily
    replaced by piping to "| jq".
  - Don't print a traceback if we pass a single, missing argument to
    diffoscope (eg. a JSON diff to re-load).

* Reporting/output improvements:

  - Reduce the default number of maximum standard error lines printed from 50
    to 25; usually the error is obvious by that point.
  - Clarify the message when we truncate the number of lines to standard
    error.
  - Clarify when an external command emits for both files, otherwise it can
    look like diffoscope is repeating itself when it is actually being run
    twice.
  - Don't repeat "stderr from {}" if both commands emit the same thing.

* Dockerfile improvements:

  - Use ARG instead of ENV for DEBIAN_FRONTEND so we do not set this
    environment variable at runtime.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#103)
  - Run diffoscope as a non-root user in the runtime container.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#102)
  - Add a .dockerignore file to whitelist files we need in our container.
    Thanks to Emanuel Bronshtein for the original idea.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#105)
  - Install/remove the build-essential package during build so we can install
    the recommended packages from Git.

* Testsuite improvements:

  - Include the Black output in the assertion failure too.
  - Update the Black self-test; we don't care about the length of the black
    output, rather whether it has some or, preferably, not.

* Codebase improvements:

  - Bump the officially required version of Python from 3.5 to 3.6.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#117)
  - Drop an unused shlex import.
  - Instruct linters to pass over a bare try-except when cleaning up
    temporary files used to extract archives.
  - Format diffoscope/comparators/utils/command.py according to Black
    19.10b0-3.
  - Drop entries from Uploaders that have not uploaded in over three years
    with esteemed thanks for their previous work.
  - Drop .travis.yml; we are using Salsa now and likely would not give
    support for running on Travis CI at this point.

[ Jelle van der Waa ]
* Update LLVM diff for LLVM version 10.

[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Add external tool reference on openssl for GNU Guix.
```

You find out more by [visiting the project homepage](https://diffoscope.org).