diffoscope

Portability to different platforms should improve. Some tools or used abstractions (like /dev/fd) might not be available.
Support for distro-specific or uncommon file formats can be improved.
The testsuite does not work everywhere (e.g. newer versions of software can break things, currently happens for Pascal). It should be more reliable.

Should we implement a flag in debdiff to call diffoscope?
Should we replace debdiff with diffoscope completely? What features of debdiff would diffoscope still need?
It’s not really clear what the post-it author wants.

Execution time is a serious issue, diffoscope should get faster.
It is not clear how well parallel Python is going to work for diffoscope due to the global interpreter lock.
Prior work by nomeata might exist somewhere.
We should have a hack session on parallel diffoscope.

https://try.diffoscope.org should be more well-known; it helpfully has a number of optional stuff for uncommon formats installed already.
Get the word out for non-reproducibility use cases like comparing across versions for updates or due diligence before deployment.
The bug tracking happens at the Debian bugtracker. That should be more visible. The website should have a “how to report bugs” section for people not familiar with the Debian bug tracker.

Should diffoscope have a plugin mechanism to support other file formats that authors may not want to upstream?

Should diffoscope output markdown?
The output should be more accessible, e.g., for screen readers. Possibly to be implemented as a new output format.

Output limits could lead to spending a lot of processing time and then still not getting usable output. Should all arbitrary limits be removed?
Short command line options
Write documentation on how to implement support for a file format
Should diffoscope support excluding specific paths in archives to cut down runtime and ignore parts that are already known to differ?
Should diffoscope support disabling support for specific file formats?

Is this in scope for diffoscope? Should this be in a separate tool?
This would require knowledge of the format and lead to much more complex file format support.
This could be helpful in outputs, e.g. if an offset changes in an ELF binary you’d get lots of related changes that could otherwise be ignored

Action Items