Re: semantic diff for Perl code

[talexb]

The solution that comes to mind is to do a git diff on the github repository that houses the module's source code. This assumes that the module's code is stored on github, and that the revision numbers are tagged in the repository.

Failing that, you may have to download and unpack the versions you want to compare in order to do a recursive diff on the two trees.

[jonadab]

This assumes that the module's code is stored on github,

git diff will work on any git repository, regardless of where it is hosted; and, more generally, diff will work even if version control is not involved, if you can put the two source trees you want to compare side by side on the filesystem.

I'm not sure this is really what was asked for, though. If a function block has been moved and possibly changed, diff mostly shows you that it was moved, and you need to actually look at the moved code line by line to see if it also changed.

[talexb]

True .. I made the leap that we were talking about modules on CPAN, and that may have been a completely unsupported hypothesis.

Since I've been using git for about ten years now (it seems that long), I now imagine git whenever someone talks about version control. And there's another logical leap.

[LanX]

From my experience with diffing a moved segment will only result in showing two unrelated differences (an insert and a cut) which are not identified as a move.

found this proposing other tools I haven't used yet,

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12590947/using-git-diff-to-detect-code-movement-how-to-use-diff-options

But these methods are language agnostic and don't use semantic knowledge of Perl.

[LanX]

>  This assumes that ...

... they used version control ... (cough ;)