Getting more out of *.diff -files

I wonder if there are tools to show *.diff files used in patching开发者_StackOverflow社区 related to debian packaging. What I need from the tool is that it could just read the diff file and show the actual files changed with changed rows, like kdiff or meld would do when comparing directly 2 different files. Or maybe I have totally wrong kind of approach to this, maybe I should ask how can I get more out of diff-files?

Kompare is able to open a .diff, and it shows you the files changed at the top, alist of changes of the selected file, and a side by side diff (for the lines that it is able to extract from the .diff.

However, when I feed it a debdiff, it got confused. The diff did not have === file headers, only --- and +++ headers, and so it included the changes from the /debian/changelog, /debian/copyright, and /debian/rules with in the /debian/control file. Ymmv.

Screenshot: http://imagebin.ca/view/fNWEzx.html

The Debian diff format seems to be a special diff format. As my short google search didn't result in a graphical tool, which could handle these files in the way normal diff tools do, I'm not sure, if such a tool exists. Perhaps you could try to convert these debiff files to normal diff files (I didn't find a tool, which would do that, either).

There is a tool to visualize changes in Linux packages (Deb, RPM, TAR.GZ, etc.) - pkgdiff.

Usage:

pkgdiff -old OLD.deb -new NEW.deb

Sample reports:

• http://lvc.github.com/pkgdiff/pkgdiff_reports/libqb/0.4.1_to_0.8.1/changes_report.html
• http://lvc.github.com/pkgdiff/pkgdiff_reports/gstreamer/0.10.23-i486-1_to_0.10.32-i486-1/changes_report.html