Comment 5 for bug 209537

Hi Michael,

While it may seem obvious that we would want diffstat to use the $COLUMNS value from the environment, this change is a behavior change for anyone running diffstat in a terminal window that's not 80 columns wide, which may have unexpected side effects for tools that invoke diffstat. So I think it's better to defer this change until after the hardy release.

In the meantime, perhaps you could consider getting this change accepted into the Debian package, so that it will flow into intrepid automatically once the archive unfreezes? Also, you may want to consider whether the decision to honor the $COLUMNS value should be conditional on whether stdout points at a terminal - this is something that packages like, e.g., dpkg do, to good effect.