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Linux Diff Tool/Utility ---> HELP!!!

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 10:02 pm
by devsh
Hey I have my folder with irrlicht source (which is uber modified awesomeness)

And there is irrlicht 1.8 release

now I'd like to Meld/Merge, is there any way to do this on a folder to folder basis???

I really like the linux VCS merge tool Meld... any way of setting this to compare two folders?

is there a way to run "diff" between two folders?

Re: Linux Diff Tool/Utility ---> HELP!!!

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 11:27 pm
by RdR
According to the website of Meld:
Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers. Meld helps you compare files, directories, and version controlled projects.
http://meldmerge.org/

Re: Linux Diff Tool/Utility ---> HELP!!!

Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 7:45 am
by hendu
You really should learn at least one version control system. Just about any of them would do that.

Re: Linux Diff Tool/Utility ---> HELP!!!

Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:01 am
by CuteAlien
VCS would do that, but the problem is when you already have a bunch of changes which never had been tracked by one. The usual diff tool is certainly diff (now there's a suprise...) which can also compare directories. But the problem if you haven't kept your changes in simple patches so far is that you will now have one big ass piece of a patch where you probably can't tell anymore which line belonged to which feature. At least I had this trouble when I started out modifying Irrlicht and wasn't careful in my first year... so well - I did go through the whole big mess of patch line for line and started splitting it up by hand into pieces until I got it split into simpler patches (took me a full week...). And those I could then apply one-by-one to Irrlicht. And from there on I either created a patch for every single change I made or used mercurial (which has revisions so it can always create patches per command-line for those). Git would also have worked certainly.

Anyway use a version control system - once you get used to it you don't ever _want_ to work without one again.