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I am an independent software development consultant, specializing in model-driven development with Eclipse technology, which has been a passion for the last ten years.  I am widely recognized for my high-quality output, timely delivery, and friendly and engaging manner.

I also happen to be a capable singer, performing sacred and secular works for choir and tenor solo from the renaissance to today.  If you are presenting vocal music in Ottawa, eastern Ontario, or west Québec, I can be your tenor.

Blog

An ad hoc record of Christian W. Damus's professional and personal activity.

Who Knew? Comparing Directories in Eclipse

Christian W. Damus

Well, isn't that a pleasant surprise to follow a rather unpleasant one.

After having spent much of the day working on OSGi-bundle-izing Apache Batik 1.7 in the Eclipse Orbit project, I discovered that the re-distribution of the W3C CSS SAC 1.3 API that is included in Batik 1.7 is, in fact, the real original content as provided by W3C.

"Great!"  you might say.

No.  The reason I know this is that what I actually discovered is that the re-distribution of the SAC 1.3 library in Batik 1.6 was a modification of the original W3C code, that I had bundled in Orbit way back when.  Mostly, the changes are either just in the CVS ID in the header comment (Apache and W3C both checked the sources into CVS) or fixing typos in the doc comments.

My heart sank when I saw that one class, the CSSException, actually had functional changes.  A bunch of its code was removed by the Batik team.  Ugh.  So, now the Orbit bundle that for so long has been touted as "the" W3C CSS SAC 1.3 API in fact isn't, and I have to figure out what kind of version number to apply now to make the new bundle look like the real deal over the old one.  The org.w3c.css.sac_1.3.0.v200803081811.jar bundle is not authentic.

Anyhow, the real point of this blog is not to complain but to congratulate the Eclipse Team Team (tee hee).  I had always used BeyondCompare to diff directory structures, but I don't have it on my current system and I was impatient, so on a lark I thought "Hey, let's see if I can do Compare With -> Each Other..." on directories in Eclipse.  Well, of course I can!  That's how I found my little Batik/SAC conundrum:

I should know by now just to assume that Eclipse can do these things.  Silly me.

Good work, Team people!  This is one more task that I don't need to escape my cozy workbench for.

∞  ≣
tags Eclipse