Re: gedcom diff

Sorry for the quite late reply - you can see how often I wade through
secondary lists when I get busy. :)

I've thought about a more literal gedcom diff - you give it two gedcoms
and a root pair, and it spits out exactly what the differences are in
some easy-to-digest way. I was thinking regular diff-like output,
actually, which could be interpreted by gedcom-savvy humans or by a
program with a UI. The hard part was deciding which sort order to put
the records in because the greatly influences how the diff looks.

I remember thinking along the same lines as you about comparing trees,
and I think that's the right approach, especially given a known root
pair. I think you would still want to compare names or some other
identifying characteristics in addition to just tree shape, which would
prevent merging multiple parents/spouses, not to mention children!

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 at 06:49 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> Has anyone come up with code that can diff two .ged files? I have two
> large files with data missing from each (two sides of the family). All the
> tools I have looked at seem to use soundex to find matches and my test
> merge has not gone well (I just used the paf5 match/merge).
> 
> I was thinking if I wrote code where I would give it a reference person
> from each file "these two are the same", the code could build a tree from
> there and then compare the trees not the names themselves to tell me which
> nodes were missing. I am still not sure how I would handle multiple
> spouses, and multiple parents and such.... but I have been mulling it
> around for a while.
> 
> Thought I would see if anyone had built anything along these lines.
> 
> --
> Chuck
> 

-- 
Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net
 
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the 
right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
    -- Johann Sebastian Bach

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