[kwlug-disc] excluding directories in diff

[Paul Nijjar]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 05:31:45PM -0400, unsolicited wrote:
>
>
>> It shouldn't hurt to put all of them in an exclude file.
>
> Attacking from another direction ... isn't this really what CVS' are all 
> about? 

It is, actually. In fact the underlying context is that I am trying to
get some diff information between a pristine tarball and a "dirty" one
to which changes have not been documented.

I want the diff to be human readable, so including images and binary
files is a no-no. 

I then want to apply the patch (possibly a little at a time) to the
pristine source and put the changes into version control. 

I tried all of John's exclude-file suggestions and none of them work
for me. 

I have not tried the "find" suggestion. I think it should work, but
the only reason it does is because taking a bunch of file-by-file
patches and concatenating them is the same as running diff through an
entire directory tree. 

Don't tell anyone, but I uploaded a zipfile of sample files here: 

http://pirg.uwaterloo.ca/~pnijjar/files/kwlug-diff-pnijjar.zip 

Feel free to play if you want. 

Honestly my motivations for solving this problem the right way have
diminished -- I think I can kludge a one-time solution with the tools I
have. But it leaves me unhappy, because diff's --exclude-from flag
does not appear to work in a very useful way. 

- Paul