MIME types, links, diff tools

[Bryce W Nesbitt]

My guess is that diffing archives is a relatively rare operation, and 
not worth too much
work.  My patch took a pragmatic approach:
       Unpack the archive
       Check if any constituent files have a special diff associated 
with them
       If no, then "diff -r".
Before this patch, archives were completely undiffable.  So "diff -r" is 
better than nothing.
I use archives as a method of grouping related files, since CVS can't do 
this itself.

Perhaps more common than archives are compressed files.  "file.doc.bz2" 
probably
is best handled by unpacking it first, then applying the mime type 
detection to the result.

                      -Bryce

Ville Skyttä wrote:

>Diffing archive contents adds another level of complexity, whether to
>use plain "diff -r" or dedicated tools for diffing each file in the
>arcive separately, and how to sanely combine the results of different
>diff tools if the latter way is chosen.
>
>Thoughts?
>