Find an alternative for go-difflib

[tbankar]

As github.com/pmezard/go-difflib is no longer maintained (EOLed), kindly find an alternative.

[MaxCaresYww]

Indeed, can this be prioritized?

[dolmen]

@MaxCaresYww What replacement do you suggest?

[bmv126]

@dolmen
Can we replace with https://github.com/martinohmann/go-difflib ?

[dolmen]

Any replacement suggestion must at least say why this would be a good candidate.

[tscales]

#1479 mentioned using go-diff which has seen adoption in popular libraries like go-git.

However, go-diff seems not very well maintained itself in recent years and the introduction of bugs has had some people sticking with v.1.1.0 until only very recently.

[brackendawson]

github.com/martinohmann/go-difflib looks to be no more maintained than github.com/pmezard/go-difflib in any practical sense.

There's no current known vulnerabilities or breaking issues in go-difflib. If there were then we would promptly replace it, possibly with a maintained fork or possibly with something else. I'd throw https://github.com/google/go-cmp into the ring as it's diff output appears to make use of non-breaking whitespace to keep the diff displaying cleanly.

For now I don't anticipate it being replaced in testify. Some orgs (including the one I work for) impose a rule on themselves to not use any unsupported packages. But testify is (should) not be being compiled into any binaries they produce. I've not seen this be a hard stop for anyone yet.

[eero-t]

According to #736, only 2 functions for go-difflib would need to be copied.