Suggest the use of current "rfcdiff" in next "pkgdiff" release

[jschleus]

First I want to say that I am a very happy user of "pkgdiff". On a server I provide are currently roughly 7.700 software package comparisons available with nearly 1.900.000 diffs reports for package member files, all generated with a slightly adapted version of "pkgdiff" (though based on version 1.6.2 with some small corrections taken from 1.6.4)!

Now I think about using the current 1.7.2 release (it's not easy for me since I am a Perl layman) and found that "pkgdiff" is stlll based on the "rfcdiff" bash script version 1.41. Meanwile exists "rfcdiff" 1.45 so my issue is to suggest the usage of that newer script (if meaningful) for an optional new "pkgdiff" release since some additions are there done (viewable for e.g. via https://fossies.org/diffs/rfcdiff/1.41_vs_1.45/).

[lvc]

Hi,

Thank you for the suggestion and for setting up the fossies.org web site.

But I'd like to write an alternative "10-line" Perl/Python script (wdiff2html) to provide exactly the same html diffs and replace the rfcdiff in the new version. The reason is that rfcdiff call is the bottleneck due to wdiff called on every line of compared files. It's enough to call wdiff once and color the output. The pkgdiff will run 10 or more times faster due to this change.

[jschleus]

Wow, that are good news if the results are comparable.

On fossies.org in some rare cases the diffs generation takes some minutes (even til an hour). I haven't really investigated the reasons (and some according packages just primitively excluded) but have the impression that for e.g. the awk-processing of minified JavaScript files with very long lines are time consuming.