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running diff on install.dat file - can it be done?

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running diff on install.dat file - can it be done?
I know that the install.dat file is binary (looks like a tar file of everything to be installed) and using unix's diff command won't get me what I want, but I'm wondering if there is a way to run a diff against versions (ie 2.0.5 to 2.0.6) for use in upgrading. I've made a lot of changes and not just to the templates and my list of what I need to redo for each upgrade is getting pretty long. I'm thinking at least in minor version upgrades, this might be an easier way for me to deal with this. Thx.
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Re: [JerryP] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
Hi,

It is a tar file, so you could just untar it to a separate directory and diff the files that way.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
Hello Alex!

Actually this would also help me.

How do I use it after I untar it?
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Re: [rajani] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
I just did this and it's not worth trying to go this route... I ran a diff on the two install.dat files after untarring them and piped the output to a text file. The text file of changes was over 6MB in size and over 3,800 lines long between 2.05 and 2.06. Guess there were a few changes there. And even after I deleted all of the .ndx files in the spellcheck directory, the size of my text file with the changes dropped way down to 190k, but was still over 3,800 lines long...
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Re: [JerryP] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
Hello!

Uh! Well, thats why I placed my message above as I was curious to find out if there was an easy method of identifying the changed files and simply work with them directly rather than going through the install routines.

Moreover the file is very confusing and difficult to trace the changes.

Did not help, well?
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Re: [rajani] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
At least in the upgrade from 2.05 to 2.06 there were a lot of changes, a bunch it looked like were changing a variable from user to email... I assume there's been some discussion on that already. But you could do this if you wanted, it would very labor-intensive it looks like. I do find diff output very easy to read and identify what has changed. If you think it would help you, here's how I did it (unix system only - I don't know windows for nothing)...

1. create two temp directories and upload the install.dat files from the two versions you want to see the differences between, one into each temp directory.

2. untar each of the .dat files by running 'tar xf filename' from the command line.

3. change directories to the one where these subdirectories were created and run diff this way
diff -r directory1name directory2name > outputfilename.txt

now in that directory you will have a text file that shows the difference between every file in those two directories, showing the filenames that had changes, the line numbers of the differences and the code that is different between the two.

I would also suggest that before you run the diff, go into the spellcheck directory for each of these and delete all the .ndx files (it creates a huge amount in the diff output for relatively minor changes).

I hope that helps.
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Re: [JerryP] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
Hi,

The spellcheck was getting included twice which is why you see that there. Also, a major change was changing the column name 'user' to 'email', as this was causing problems on Postgres (as user is a reserved word).

We can provide diffs quite easily between any version, so if there's something I can post that would help, just let me know.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] running diff on install.dat file - can it be done? In reply to
In Reply To:
Hi,

We can provide diffs quite easily between any version, so if there's something I can post that would help, just let me know.

Cheers,

Alex

I would appreciate if I can have a text file containing a list of changed files. Otherwise, I have to go through manually every template and other scripts with Windows Commander (www.Ghisler.com) to identify which and where are those files and finally compare them. However this is a lot off work and presumably everyone would need to do it if they did customize.