Purpose

The Distribution Diff Tool is a command line tool which compares two Eclipse based distributions and creates a report of the differences between them. It performs differences on the structure of class files, but does not compare resources (.properties, .gif, .jpg files etc.). This gives the user an idea of what changed between two builds, without having to wade through source changes.

What's new

• Method body comparision (thanks to Olivier Thomann!)
• Exported plugin & fragment support, the tool now finds fragments and exported plugins
• Output is now xml
• An ant script to run the whole process
• Filtering support using xsl transforms
• HTML reports now made from the xml files
• Ability to specify the match level to control how plugin IDs are compared
• Eclipse based, so the binaries are less than 100KB.
• Update site install
• Internationalized messages

Install

Install the Distribution Diff Tool using the update manager in Eclipse. The URL for the update site is: http://www.eclipse.org/jdt/core/tools/diff/com.oti.min.distributiondiff-updatesite/

Once you have installed the Distribution Diff Tool, read the README.html located in the docs subdirectory of the com.min.oti.distributiondiff_3.0.0 plugin.

To run the tool, check the README.html file.

Examples of generated reports

Report comparing Eclipse 2.0.3 to Eclipse 2.1.0