bug#53343: 29.0.50; assertion failure in diff--iterate-hunks

[Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:07:49 +0100 Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:

> Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net> writes:
>
>> On the other hand, I get the assertion failure with the above recipe in
>> emacs-28 and emacs-27, and it seems unlikely that such a bug in
>> diff-mode would have gone unnoticed till now, so maybe the diff is
>> malformed.  (Though if so, why does the failure not happen when visiting
>> the file containing the diff?)
>
> I tried
>
> (setq debug-on-error t)
>
> put the diff in a file, and got a backtrace when loading it.
>
> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Unknown diff hunk type")
>   signal(error ("Unknown diff hunk type"))
>   error("Unknown diff hunk type")
>   diff-hunk-text("" nil nil)
>   diff-syntax-fontify-hunk(506 506 t)
> etc

Yes, I get this too.  I must have mistested that before.

> So I've now made that function less assertative, and that fixes this
> issue.

Thanks, and I confirm your fix avoids the error.  However, you added
this to the doc string of `diff-ignore-whitespace-hunk': "If
INHIBIT-ERROR, ignore malformed hunks."  But you didn't add an
INHIBIT-ERROR argument.

Steve Berman