My best tool with package bumps: Meld 2012-04-09

For quite some time I have been using Meld to detect relevant changes between two releases when I update a package in Gentoo. I run

# ebuild foobar-1.2.ebuild manifest prepare
# ebuild foobar-1.3.ebuild manifest prepare

and throw Meld at both outputs

# meld /var/tmp/portage/[..]/foobar-1.2/work/foobar-1.2/ \
       /var/tmp/portage/[..]/foobar-1.3/work/foobar-1.3/ &

Meld makes it easy to see what has changed and (especially) what has not changed. With sole diff -r that would be difficult.

I usually start by inspecting changes to configure.ac. If upstream did a good job that diff tells what dependencies to touch, already. Near the left and right margin you can see where else the file has been modified. No need to scroll-search down for more: you already know what you get.

The NEWS and ChangeLog files usually offer pointers of interest, too.

If my hint on Meld made a single Gentoo packager juggler’s life easier or more efficient, I have achieved what I was aiming for. Sorry for the noise to everyone else.

PS: The second preview image up there has been losslessly reduced by 40% in size just by running it through optipng -o7.

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The My best tool with package bumps: Meld by Sebastian Pipping, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Filed Under Category: Gentoo, Planet Gentoo
Comments: 5 Comments
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5 Comments
atomopawn April 9th, 2012

I use vimdiff for essentially the same sorts of things. Kompare is also nice.

Miller April 9th, 2012

I’ve been using meld for a long time, and have been using this for the same reasons outlined above, yet the purpose has been for comparing config file updates with etc-update.

I’ve mentioned this before, but got flamed.

Nikolaj Sjujskij April 10th, 2012

kdiff3 is also very nice (and not KDE-dependant, as you might think).

Wicher April 10th, 2012

That’s a pretty tree diff. I’ll try Meld next time (instead of colordiff -Naur).

@Miller: You could try dispatch-conf in combination with dev-util/imediff2. Put this in your /etc/dispatch-conf.conf:

merge=”imediff2 –output=’%s’ ‘%s’ ‘%s’”

imediff2 is a very friendly merge tool (good for single files, not for tree diffs).

Enlik April 11th, 2012

Let me mention two other similar tools: xxdiff and dirdiff.
However, probably only Meld shows useful feedback about broken symbolic links which can be useful too.

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