How to make nice looking diffs

I was wondering how to make nice looking diff patch files yesterday, as using "diff " gave really cryptic outputs and not very user friendly. I IM'ed Aizat who happened to be online in Chile. He just said use "svn diff". I told him that I was working on files local on my machine, so svn was not appropriate.

Googling didn't help much. So I just submitted the standard diff output as my patch.

Then this morning, Ow had a blog post about his patch, and he included his command line. The answer is "diff -Nau"!

So here is the patch for the archivemail-dspam script:

yky@x1407:~/dspam$ diff -Nau archivemail archivemail-dspam
--- archivemail 2007-12-18 19:13:34.000000000 +0800
+++ archivemail-dspam   2007-12-18 19:02:47.000000000 +0800
@@ -187,6 +187,8 @@
    min_size             = None
    verbose              = 0
    warn_duplicates      = 0
+    """ 071218   yky  DSPAM-Confidence setting """
+    spam_confidence = 0.00

    def parse_args(self, args, usage):
        """Set our runtime options from the command-line arguments.
@@ -206,7 +208,7 @@
                             "filter-append=", "pwfile=", "dont-mangle",
                            "archive-name=",
                             "preserve-unread", "quiet", "size=", "suffix=",
-                             "verbose", "version", "warn-duplicate"])
+                             "verbose", "version", "warn-duplicate", "spam=" ])
        except getopt.error, msg:
            user_error(msg)

@@ -256,6 +258,8 @@
                self.verbose = 1
            if o == '--archive-name':
                self.archive_name = a;
+            if o == '--spam':
+                self.spam_confidence = float(a)
            if o in ('-V', '--version'):
                print __version__ + "\n\n" + __copyright__
                sys.exit(0)
@@ -265,7 +269,7 @@
        """Complain bitterly about our options now rather than later"""
        if self.output_dir:
            check_sane_destdir(self.output_dir)
-        if self.days_old_max <>= 10000:
            user_error("--days argument must be less than 10000")
@@ -661,6 +665,7 @@
      --include-flagged messages flagged important can also be archived
      --no-compress     do not compress archives with gzip
      --warn-duplicate  warn about duplicate Message-IDs in the same mailbox
+      --spam=FLOAT      SPAM Confidence levels ( e.g. 0.80  )
  -v, --verbose         report lots of extra debugging information
  -q, --quiet           quiet mode - print no statistics (suitable for crontab)
  -V, --version         display version information
@@ -737,6 +742,22 @@
    mbox_from = "From %s %s\n" % (address, date_string)
    return mbox_from

+
+def get_spam_confidence(message):
+       """Returns the DSPAM_Confidence from the message headers. Zero by default"""
+       """ 071218  yky  Created """
+
+       assert(message != None)
+
+       for header in ('X-DSPAM-Confidence', 'SPAM-Confidence'):
+               confidence = message.get(header)
+               if confidence:
+                               confidence_val = float( confidence )
+                               if confidence_val:
+                                       vprint("Spam Confidence: %f " % confidence_val)
+                                       return confidence_val
+
+       return 0.0

def guess_return_path(message):
    """Return a guess at the Return Path address of an rfc822 message"""
@@ -987,6 +1008,11 @@
        return 0
    if options.preserve_unread and is_unread(message):
        return 0
+
+        # 071218  yky  Filtering by SPAM Confidence       
+    if (options.spam_confidence > 0) and (options.spam_confidence > get_spam_confidence(message)):
+               return 0
+   
    return 1
       
   
@@ -1019,7 +1045,7 @@
    max_days -- maximum number of days before message is considered old
      
    """
-    assert(max_days >= 1)
+    assert(max_days >= 0)

    time_now = time.time()
    if time_message > time_now:

Thanks Ow!

yk.