GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 644910
Compare archive files (tar.gz or zip)
Last modified: 2017-12-13 18:55:46 UTC
Sometimes you're editing files inside an archive (for example, OpenOffice files are zipped archives of XML files) and you want to compare the files inside. You could unarchive the files, compare the directories, and rearchive as necessary. But if you want to make quick changes and test their effects, this adds a lot of time. It would be nice for meld to be able to access the files in the archive without unarchiving first. This might be easy to implement using GVFS. In terms of user interface, in the "Compare directory" dialog you could select a "Directory, or archive containing a directory".
I agree that this might be nice, but I also think that it's somewhat corner-case functionality. Either way, I'm not likely to get time to spend on this any time soon, though I'd take a look at a patch if it appeared. UI is hard; the gtk filechooser doesn't have a 'file or directory' mode, so we can't actually allow selecting a directory or archive with the same filechooser. We also don't currently depend on gvfs, though it would be great to add support for it.
Alternative UI: Open using the normal file dialog. If the file to be opened is detected to be an archive, open it as a directory (presumably nobody wants to bit-compare zip files).
Sure - a normal file dialog is needed. However, we only start a normal file-open dialog for a "File comparison", which is clearly the wrong place to start a zip-based directory comparison... technically fairly easy, but broken UI-wise. We can punt the whole UI problem until we can get a sensible file chooser, and make zip-comparison only accessible from the command line. Either way, it's an academic point until we have the rest of the code.
Couldn't this be fixed simply by File/Directory/Archive comparison UI? I wouldn't say it is a overkill to have another tab in New... menu.
*** Bug 437635 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/issues/30.