Thank you for the report, but what you are seeing is the intended
behavior. What if diff (with or without --brief) were to print even
just the names of all files under your README directory, recursively?
Consider what this invocation of diff should print:
touch /tmp/usr && diff -r /tmp/usr /
Currently, it prints only this:
File /tmp/usr is a regular empty file while file /usr is a directory
while with your suggestion, it would print something for each of the
many files under /usr.
[I've Cc'd the bug-diffutils mailing list, per instructions at the
bottom of "diff --help" output]