GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 691317
documentation of small star on folder icons during dirdiff?
Last modified: 2016-12-31 07:18:41 UTC
I was confused when doing a dirdiff by what the significance could be of the small star in the upper right of the folder icons in the dir trees. I read most of the documentation here: http://meldmerge.org/help/ but I did not see it mentioned. It turns out it is in the documentation and that I missed it. Thus, this is my mistake and not a bug. Kai pointed out the last phrase in the "States in folder comparisons" -- "Finally, the most recently modified file/folder has an emblem attached to it." (from Kai's email, https://mail.gnome.org/archives/meld-list/2013-January/msg00004.html): <<Problem is that I didn't want to say "it's the little star", because that's theoretically themeable. In practice, we ship our own version of the icon, so we probably should just say it; could you please file a bug? Ideally, that whole section would have a graphic showing what the states actually *look* like, but images in docs tend to get out of date.>>
Created attachment 237189 [details] Screenshot 1 - Meld comparison results
Created attachment 237190 [details] Screenshot 2 - Directory 1 in Nautilus
Created attachment 237191 [details] Screenshot 3 - Other directory in Nautilus
Meld is a fantastic product! Thank you for making it. I noticed the emblem / star when using meld. Note in the attached screenshots that ScreenShot1 (ss1) shows the stars imposed on the file icons. ss2 and ss3 show the actual files as reported by Nautilus. Date Modified for the particular files are identical. Is Meld using other data than the shown date / time to make the comparison? Meld online help says "Finally, the most recently modified file/folder has an emblem attached to it." Am I missing some information as date and time are the same? Looking for clarification. Thanks again for a great piece of software. All the best, Jason A.
Although the date appears to be identical in your file browser, do you that the underlying data is identical? Run "stat <filename>" That should give you an idea. Best, Scott
Aha... There are small differences in the time. Usually in milliseconds. So does Meld compare the contents of the binary files then to determine that they are in fact the same?
Created attachment 237450 [details] Stat results - 1
Created attachment 237451 [details] Stat results - 2
Hmmm. Apparently Meld does not compare biniary file data as I tried to do a file / file compare and Meld didn't like it. Is Meld then comparing file sizes and blocks and making a comparison decision based on that info?
This isn't the place for general discussion, but anyway. By default, Meld does a byte-by-byte binary comparison when in folder mode. However, actually showing a binary diff is a *very* different proposition to showing a text diff, and we don't support that in file comparisons. In 1.7.1, Meld also has a shallow comparison option for folder comparisons. If you enable that, Meld will compare files based on size and mtime.
In current master I've just updated the docs on this to mention that it's a star. This is kind of silly, but there's not much else we can do docs-wise. There's an open bug for adding a legend (though I have no idea what that might look like) and bug 677360 talks about providing more information (hopefully helping to de-mystify some of this) in a tooltip (which seems to be okay, based on my prototype implementation). Thanks for the bug report.
Thanks, Kai!