Re: feature request for ediff

[Michael Kifer]

Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi> writes:
>
> dmaster@synopsys.com (David Masterson) writes:
> 
> | >>>>> agrawal  writes:
> | 
> | > ediff is extremely useful, but seems a bit clunky for diffing
> | > directory trees. As far as I can tell, one must descend through the
> | > directory tree "by hand", checking each directory for any
> | > differences between files. It seems preferable to have a recursive
> | > option, where ediff would do a diff -r <dir1> <dir2>, and then let
> | > the user browse through only those directories that have
> | > differences.
> | 
> | Are you suggesting that it popup a new ediff buffer for each (pair
> | of?) files that it find different?  All at once or one at a time?
> 
> I don't see him suggesting that.  FWIW, I would also like a feature
> like the one agrawal requests.  Essentially, just like you can
> (i)nsert subdirectories to a single dired buffer or have all the
> subdirectories and their subdirectories be inserted by adding -R to
> ls switches, there should be a way to have a whole directory tree
> (or just have few specific subdirectories inserted) in a single
> ediff session buffer instead of one ediff session buffer per
> directory.
> 
> In addition, a command to simply replace session's file in
> directory B with the file in directory A (and vice versa) would be
nice.  It should preferably work so that one can mark several
> sessions and then apply this operation to all of them.
> 
> - -- 
> Hannu


Ediff does traverse the dir tree. However, you must actually visit each
directory in the ediff window in order to see if there are changes.
What might be reasonable is to prune out the directories that have no
differences. However, the devil is always in the details. For instance,
what do you do with remote directories? The implementation of remote access
in Dired is not transparent in emacs. (By the way, the implementation in
XEmacs is transparent, but I didn't look carefully at the differences.)


        --michael