Source-tree diff summary information

Question

I'd like to find out what has changed between versions of a large project such as Mozilla-Firefox, i.e. similar to the question but must work on Linux and is open-source. I'm aware of Source Code Diff / Line and File Comparison which is Windows based.

I currently have two large tarballs of the actual released version of Firefox 5.0 and 6.0 which I have extracted into two folders mozilla-release-5.0/ and mozilla-release-6.0/

I'd like to see similar summary information for the diff of the two source trees, i.e.

• # of LINES added / removed / modified • # of FILES added / removed / modified

Ideally these figures are for lines of source code and blank lines etc. are ignored.

Note that as this is for statistical analysis, I don't care about the actual lines themselves and I am only interested in the summary figures.

Answer 1

To get the histogram that for example git diff --stat produces for submissions, you can use "diffstat" - although it doesn't appear to be able to distinguis empty line changes.

Answer 2

Try also pkgdiff to visualize differences between directories or packages.

Diff directories:

pkgdiff -d DIR-0/ DIR-1/

Diff packages:

pkgdiff PKG-0.tgz PKG-1.tgz