Recursive directory diff support

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Please add a feature for recursive diff between two directories, creating a 
single patch that describes the differences.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by schmid...@gmail.com on 4 Sep 2011 at 7:32

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thank you for your interest in open-vcdiff.  The encoder produces a delta file 
from a source (or dictionary) file and a target file.  To apply VCDIFF to a 
directory in the file system, you might use "tar" or a similar archiving 
utility to gather the directory contents into a stream of bytes suitable for 
use as the target file.

Original comment by openvcd...@gmail.com on 27 Sep 2011 at 10:02

• Added labels: Priority-Low, Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Priority-Medium, Type-Defect

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I already tried the tar approach, but it revealed not practical for 
distributing patches to end users:

1) It requires that the end-users have tar installed. Most don't even know that 
this tool exist.
2) It requires scripts to be created to (a) tar the destination directory into 
a file and (b) apply the patch. But different systems have different scripting 
shells: cmd32.exe, bash, ksh etc
3) There's now way to assure that the user's tar will behave like my system tar 
and assemble the file in the same way (different implementation, different file 
order, username, permissions, etc)
4) It requires me to distribute the patch without checksum checking, which 
means the users will have no easy way to be sure if the resulting files are 
correct, because they will not know if the source files were correct. This 
means that the users will have to manually check the entire directory checksum 
before applying the patch. I can't even convince the users to check a single 
file, what can be said about they hypothetically checking an entire directory 
tree?  :)

Original comment by schmid...@gmail.com on 27 Sep 2011 at 11:22