Re: [NAnt-users] creating a diff of two paths...

[Bob A. <Bob...@am...>]

Hi Ken,

Sounds very cool and useful. Maybe you could make it into a Nant task and submit it for consideration to the contrib project. I went a little more low tech using a foreach and uptodate tag. Here is what I ended up with. It surprisingly works well... not surprisingly it is a bit slow. But, that's ok for now. Of course, it doesn't handle deletes... but that is fine... I needed this to build a "hotfix" which only includes the newer/added files.

                <foreach item="File" property="filename">
                                <in><items basedir="${ReleaseDir}"><include name="**"/></items></in>
                                <do>
                                <property name="filename.tocompare" value="${string::replace(filename,path::get-full-path(ReleaseDir),path::get-full-path(ReleaseDir.Rev0))}" />
                                <uptodate property="filename.uptodate">
                                                <sourcefiles>
                                                                <include name="${filename}" />
                                                </sourcefiles>
                                                <targetfiles>
                                                                <include name="${filename.tocompare}" />
                                                </targetfiles>
                                </uptodate>
                                <echo message="File ${filename} has been updated" unless="${filename.uptodate}" />
                                <copy todir="${InstallDir.HF}" unless="${filename.uptodate}">
                                                <fileset basedir="${ReleaseDir}">
                                                                <include name="${string::replace(filename,path::get-full-path(ReleaseDir+'\'),'')}" />
                                                </fileset>
                                </copy>
                                </do>
                </foreach>

From: Parrish, Ken [mailto:KPa...@go...]
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 5:11 PM
To: Bob Archer; nan...@li...
Subject: RE: creating a diff of two paths...

Bob,

This basic problem was causing us fits for a long time.  I scoured the web for directory difference tools that could help.   There are a dozen or more tools out there, but none really works the way you want in a source code and/or deployment environment (believe it or not)  and can be run from the command line (e.g. from Nant).

So, I wrote my own directory differencing tool in .NET.  It's a command line program that will generate an XML file which contains a list the differences between two directories.  It filters out SVN control files.  Has filters to include any combination of  SAME, MODIFIED, DELETED or ADDED files or directories.  I then use the output of this tool (via Nant <exec> task) to copy selected differences from one location to another, and other used.  The XML output is parsed via the <xmllist> task.  The XML output has markers to make parsing easier via <xmllist>.

It is used most often to calculate the difference between two checked-out versions of the runtime image of a deployable software component and perform incremental updates without having to copy 1000's of files (esp. web sites).  Can also be used to identify new and or deleted files when synchronizing directories.

It could be adapted to include and calculate file/directory dates for differencing as well.

Ken Parrish
Gomez, Inc.

From: Bob Archer [mailto:Bob...@am...]
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 2:03 PM
To: nan...@li...
Subject: [NAnt-users] creating a diff of two paths...

I see that in Nant the copy command only copies newer files. What I want to be able to do is copy files to a delta folder if they are newer rather than to the destination folder.

So, for example given two paths, MyPath/v0 and MyPath/v1 I want to copy all the files from MyPath/v1 that are newer than MyPath/v0 to MyPath/v1-Diff. Sort of a combination of the uptodate and copy tasks?

The only way I can think to do it now is to loop through each file and use an uptodate task in the loop. But, that seems like it would be quite slow.

Any ideas appreciated.

BOb