GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 131232
Let the recursivity of directory diffs be customizable
Last modified: 2017-12-13 18:43:01 UTC
[ Copy pasting from sourceforge tracker ] The directory selection dialog for directory diffs could include a counter representing the recursivity of the diff. Currently it's very hard to diff the base of a very deep tree because of the time scanning all the subtrees takes. ============ Reply from steve ============== Good idea - but I think it would be better to make the scanning more intelligent than to specify some arbitrary limit. How about: scan breadth first instead of depth first Except if a user opens a directory then it is scanned immediately.
I think improving the scanning algorithm like you say is a good thing and would maybe solve the problem when you do recursive diffs. Nevertheless, I would really love to have an option to not recurse in subdirectories.
Also it would be nice to have an option "Don't follow symlink", should I report another bug ?
Yes, please open a separate bug.
I too would like an option to disable recursive compare. I have a tree with literally hundreds of thousands of files. I need to be able to compare a single level of this tree. Comparing the whole huge tree structure is useless, not to mention takes hours.
If you'd like to have a look at this, see dirdiff.py:1035 The line containing todo.append is where the recursion is performed. I suppose you could examine the number of "/" in the name at this point.
I'm working on a patch. Functionality and UI is there, but I have no idea on where to save the max. recursion depth and on how to pass that the way down to _search_recursively_iter.
I would also really really appreciate an option to disable recursive diff for directory comparison. As proposed above, with this option enabled, a directory is scanned for diff only when it is opened. Collapsing subfolders takes a long time when you just want to compare a known subset of the tree, and you have to do it again when you change an option (do not display identical files e.g). See also bug 759683, bug 776828.
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