[PATCH] Add directory diff options for shallow file comparison mode

[Cristian Dinu <goc9000 gmail com>]

Hello all,

I'm attaching a patch that adds an option for performing 'shallow' directory comparisons, i.e. trusting the file size and modification time. This is useful for folks like me who would also like to use Meld as a general-purpose tool for comparing their current data (documents, music etc.) to what is stored on a backup drive. Normally Meld always performs a costly binary comparison even if the size and mtime match, which is unreasonable and prohibitively expensive for such a scenario.

Because such comparisons may occur between different filesystems (e.g. backing up your ext4 files on a NTFS or FAT drive), I have also added two more options to compensate for two problems that may occur. First, file permissions may not translate exactly across filesytems, so there is the option to ignore differences in permissions (however, files differing in other aspects of the mode are still distinguished). Second, different filesystems may and often do have different timestamp resolutions, so I've added an option whereby the user can normalize the timestamps to a common resolution, allowing for a correct comparison.

The three new options have been added to a "Directory Comparison" tab in the Preferences dialog.

Looking forward to your comments!

Cheers,

--

Cristian

Attachment: shallow_dir_diff.patch
Description: Binary data