diffoscope wishlist

50-minute + 10-minute session on day 2

After reviewing what diffoscope is already able to do, here are some more ideas of what it could do:

• Write a wrapper around diff that strips out large identical chunks and only feeds in smaller chunks so that diffing can work on huge files. diff currently does not care about not supporting e.g. a million line long files because if your source code file is that large: you’re doing it wrong so diffoscope can have problems with huge diffs.
• Multithreaded/parallel processing.
• Better/smarter ELF diffing. Crazy idea, amongst others: use DWARF symbols to display the lines of code responsible for a given difference.
• Add a command line flag for “ignore profiles” removing differences that are not relevant or paths that can be ignored.
• Replace Open Build Service’s pkg-diff.sh tool with diffoscope to allow better understanding of package differences.
• Sandboxed environment to secure diffoscope on untrusted input.
• Internal anchor links in the HTML report to be able to jump around. Typically from a file in a file list to its differences.
• Image comparisons (GitHub does them right)
• Hint system that provides suggestions on how to fix a problem.
• Have a hosted web service for doing the diffing (will require a sandbox).
• Start an embedded HTML server so that you can view diffing results coming in as soon as they are computed.