Hi Olek,
First to correct one thing I said previously. The libdiffutils-java package is indeed a fork of the one Bazel has been using instead of what I said a character based diff implementation. I confused it with a different project
diff-match-patch.
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
Theoretically we can port Bazel to use the newer j-d-u library. I tried to do that, but it turned out the old version (diffutils-1.3.0) is imported in Google's internal code base and is a dependency by many other projects, including the internal version of Bazel.
So it's very hard to migrate Bazel to the forked version of j-d-u.
Well that's not good news... :( Do you know if there's a newer/maintained version of the pre-fork diffutils somewhere?
As for the old version, I don't see where the license issue comes from. The code is very simple and it should be under Apache 2 license. I still hope we can have it in Debian if that's possible.
It seemed there was some ambiguity on licensing from the links Andrej posted. Do you know who (if anyone) is responsible for diffutils at Google now? If Google holds copyright then it should be possible to get clarification on that license.
-Olek