Why DiffReport?

Objective

The need for this tool was only to ensure we do not do junk!

This tool (Tool)

I am just giving a classical example from my current project. I have a small development team to manage and often I need to do code review. To perform this review I simply go with the word of the mouth for the list of files that I need to review to approve for the release. I really have no time to check the diff of 2 huge trees. We manage around close to 2000 java files. I was initially impressed with diff3 tool from sourceforge and enjoyed using it. When I wanted to automate the comparing task to get the delta I had very little that the tool could do. I then thought of writing my own. Thus came this tool.

Junk work (Plugins)

Once I wrote this tool I also felt that we can use this tool to avoid doing "junk work". Like I tried to run this tool with PMD another favorite project from sourceforge. I had set a control line saying there is zero tolerance towards introducing P1 or P2. I did not want to run the PMD for the entire code base and walk through the lines of code. So i flt there could be something useful to introduce the plugin feature that can take PMD, Checkstyle, Findbugs... and many more in the future. I will basically try to make a useful tool to run the Code analyzer only on the delta and report me if there were issues. Running these tool on code that has never changed for ages is a waste of effort. I always call them "junk work".

Finally

Hey often when we maintain a huge code base it would be a real pain to get the delta for patch deployment as a report. We have real cool tools like beyond compare/diff3 and many more tools to get graphical user experience to show the diff. I just wrote a tool that can be used part of a shell script / batch file. The sole purpose of this tool is to get a plain text report for other programs to use the output file and can be part of automation that can be planned with this output.