diff and patchOne should be able to use GNU diff to generate a
patch from any pair of directory trees, and given the patch and a copy
of one such tree, use patch to generate a faithful copy of
the other. Unfortunately, some changes to directory trees cannot be
expressed using current patch formats; also, patch does not
handle some of the existing formats. These shortcomings motivate the
following suggested projects.
| • Internationalization: | Handling multibyte and varying-width characters. | |
| • Changing Structure: | Handling changes to the directory structure. | |
| • Special Files: | Handling symbolic links, device special files, etc. | |
| • Unusual File Names: | Handling file names that contain unusual characters. | |
| • Timestamp Order: | Outputting diffs in timestamp order. | |
| • Ignoring Changes: | Ignoring certain changes while showing others. | |
| • Speedups: | Improving performance. |