[PD] finding differences between almost identical patches

Roman Haefeli reduzent at gmail.com
Sun Feb 20 14:11:48 CET 2022



On Sun, 2022-02-20 at 13:03 +0100, rolfm at dds.nl wrote:
> hi list,
> 
> is there a smart way to find the difference between 2 versions of a
> patch?
> 

Actually, the Pd file format is not really well "diff"able.  Even if
you edit only one object within canvas with many objects, the implicit
order of the objects changes, which leads to all subsequent 'connect'
statements to change. A really tiny edit can (and most often does) lead
to a quite large diff. Also, this makes it hard to concurrently work on
patches and merge changes. It will almost inevitably lead to merge
conflicts. 

Still, I think a tool for tracking differences in text files like 'git
diff' or Kdiff3 is your best bet. If I am looking at a diff for the
purpose of figuring what has changed, I consider mainly the 'obj'
statements and try to identify new or deleted objects while ignoring
the 'connect' statements. Also, the 'canvas' statements seem to create
a lot of noise when stuff has been moved around.  Often, a change
happened within a certain subpatch and looking at the diff gives you a
clue about which subpatch is affected. To see and experience the actual
difference, I open both version with Pd and compare visually and
experimentally. 

Roman
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