I hacked together something for GIO folder comparison

[heikkiket]

Hello everyone!

I commented to Gitlab issue1 few months ago, but didn’t receive any comments. So I decided to use this channel to contact others interested in Meld development. This is what I wrote at Gitlab:

Hello!

I decided to look at Gio to see how hard it would be to port the comparison on top of that.

I got something up (at least Meld doesn’t crash when loading folder trees), but the comparison is totally broken at the moment. However, I put my hacking to a separate branch:

Commits · gio-folders · Heikki Ketoharju / meld · GitLab

Currently the comparison can read a folder tree and iterate through it using Gio.File objects. Comparing them doesn’t work basically at all, and trees are messed up.

What would be the right place to discuss more about this? When reading the code I got the feeling it could need a little bit greater update than just replacing os-module calls with Gio-calls and some utility functions with others…

[kaiw (Kai Willadsen)]

Sorry, this is my bad! I’ll follow up on the Gitlab issue.

Suffice it to say that you’re not wrong and the comparison logic needs a bit of modernisation, but also the existing code has ironed out a lot of problems over the years. Wholesale replacing the underlying folder traversal is actually a good idea, but if we can selectively replace individual parts over time, we’d be in a much better place.