Directory Diff

I also need this feature :)
At the moment I've to use DirDiff, which I think is unmaintained and depends on the Tcl/Tk

+1

I would love this! I've researched for programs that do this and I think the best three are (in order of quality and features):
1) meld
2) dirdiff
3) fldiff

I've been thinking about design requirements for folder comparison in Diffuse. I'd like to hear some thoughts on what is important for the design.

glarrain, all of those programs provide very different views of folder comparison. What is it about those programs that make them stand above the rest? Is there any particular feature you think Diffuse would need for it to be superior to those programs?

Hi,

I think the way I would like to see Diffuse folder functionality implemented is the same way as Beyond Compare does it: http://www.scootersoftware.com/images/FolderCompare.png

- Use tree structure in the comparison. This would be nice, but not essential.
- Show folders having no differences in one color (grey)
- Show folder being only in the left side in a color (red) and the ones being only in the right side in another (blue)
- Show common folders having inner changes in different color (half red and half blue)
- As you expand the tree or enter into a folder, you can see what's different and equal to the other side

I hope it helps.

@dtmoser Meld is far superior than the other two. fldiff is excessively simple and almost all it does is show the differences but does not offer courses of action. Dirdiff is a little more sophisticated, allowing up to 5 directories to be compared at once. Its five-color-icon way to express the relative age between files/folders seems to be effective. However, I don't think 5 directories is really a requirement and would be useful very occasionally.

Meld is programmed in python (which is obviously good), has an elaborated GUI, with more than just the basic options available. It also works with all the popular SCM tools. It has file filters and text filters, encoding options, etc. An import feature is its recursive directory comparison, as it is accomplished in a user-friendly way, without requiring to open each folder to check for reported changes. It also offers a 3-way comparison. Its help contents are fairly complete and use the same (GNOME) format as diffuse.

Although in its homepage it says the last version is from 2009, in the ftp download folder newer versions (July 2011) can be found.

PS: right now I don't have access to the latest versions of any of these programs. I installed the ones available in the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS repositories (Meld 1.3.0, fldiff 1.1, dirdiff 2.1).

edit: "It also works with all the popular SCM tools." is not true. I was looking at diffuse options when I wrote that. Sorry

Since Meld works slower and compares corner cases worse than diffuse, I'd like to switch fully to diffuse. But missing this feature doesn't really allow to do this.

What is still blocking progress on this?

The problem is a drop in available free time to work on the design and implementation of this feature. Unfortunately, this has caused the rate of progress to slow significantly.

Did you think about making infrastructure ready for this? I mean, you know good the code to spend at least time to add GUI stuff and stub functions for logic. Then someone else without need to understand GUI code details could concentrate on programming the logic. Or the main problem is the GUI (approach just like in Meld)?