treecomp.py -- rationale and limitations

Rationale

We have not used an off-the-shelf tool for the following reasons:

• we have not found a command line tool with source code

• python's filecmp.dircmp API (http://www.python.org/doc/2.5/lib/dircmp-objects.html) is pretty close to what we wanted

• a specialized home-grown tool provides flexibility for future automations

Limitations

The assumptions explained in the overview can be understood as limitations: treecomp.py overview#Assumptions

Room for improvement

• paths are not normalized

• toy examples can't be run, because there are no scripts to undo the effects, what in turn breaks the unit-tests. (see using treecomp.py#toy use.)