On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
It is how the Pd patch looks that is meaningful, so I think that rendering an image of each patch/subpatch then using some kind of visual diff would be a good place to start.
There is the Visual Diff feature in desiredata, which blinks a big .gif file over a complete patcher, but this was meant for showing difference in rendering for the same patch in two pd versions.
Such a visual diff doesn't work when the patch has been spliced with new content because the blinking doesn't enhance the meaningful difference. the gif would have to be slided manually over the patch to account for insertions. Well, it could be done automatically too, but that's relatively very complicated. Then handling long patches and subpatches to make sure every change gets noticed, would be more complications.
In the end, what is important is not how the Pd patch looks, it's the content of the pd file. But not all of it : the ordering of the objects has to be somehow ignored, normalised or controlled in some way.
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