there is another base64 program that performs the same purpose as
base64 in coreutils:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64/

It accepts -e or --encode to mean the same thing that GNU base64
implies with no arguments.  It also accepts -n and --noerrcheck to
mean the same thing as GNU base64's -i and --ignore-garbage.

A friend just installed it from FreeBSD ports, and says that that
base64 also works the way GNU base64 does if no arguments are
supplied, though the man page [0] isn't clear on that.

If GNU base64 just accepted (and ignored) -e and --encode arguments,
and treated -n and --noerrcheck as synonyms for -i, then scripts
written to invoke fourmilab's base64 could use GNU's instead.

Attached is a patch that should handle it.  I didn't update the usage
output because it seems like a lot of noise, but i did get the info
docs.  It's not clear to me if the man pages need touching up too, or
if they'll get re-genned from info somehow.

Thanks for maintaining coreutils in debian!
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Control: tags -1 = wontfix
[..]

FreeBSD in the meantime switched to another implementation, and the
options taken by the three implementations are so divergent that I
think it is unreasonable to expect any of them to accept the
other's.

Untagging patch and tagging wontfix then, as I don't think its
useful anymore.