Seemingly identically-named folders do not match on each side of the directories comparison, but there is no indication as to why
I don't really know how to describe this well, let alone explain the exact cause, but with Meld 3.22.0 from Fedora 39, as well as previous versions (if I recall correctly), when doing some document folders reconciliations I often run into cases where Meld thinks a folder is simultaneously "new" (colored in green) and missing on both sides of the comparison... here's an example comparing two versions of a folder containing a bunch of per-year folders:
This is causing a lot of false positives, and since Meld somehow thinks it's simultaneously "new" and "missing" on both sides, then it's unable to actually compare those subfolders (and the sub-subfolders, etc.). As if the two sides were not talking/connecting to each other. It also makes the scrollable length of the diff's tree unmanageable since everything is duplicated.
Attempted troubleshooting / additional info
- The subfolders are named identically (as far as I know), and I think the only thing that changes between them is the modification timestamps of the folders themselves (not necessarily the contents/files)...
- ...at the same time, if that was the case, why isn't the "2016" folder in that screenshot affected? It has divergent folder timestamps!
- In the "File filters" menu, even if I enable "Ignore filename case" and "Normalize unicode paths", the problem remains.
- This is all on an ext4 filesystem.
- In the Preferences dialog, in "Folder Comparisons":
- The timestamp resolution is set to
100ns (NTFS)
, but setting it to1ns (ext4)
didn't help - Enabling "Compare files based only on size and timestamp" didn't help
- The timestamp resolution is set to
- The folders are not symlinks, though it's inside a fairly long path of nested directories.
- It happens even if I launch the folders comparison from the command line from the root containing the two folders to be compared, and it even happens when I specify only a sub-folder present in the two folders I want to compare), with either:
- complicated paths in a command such as:
meld "A (last snapshot in 2021-06, merged)/Foo (oui, en 2023-11 s'arrête à 2021-11)"/ B/Foo/
, or; - a simplified set of paths, with a command such as
meld A/Foo B/Foo
- complicated paths in a command such as:
- No errors nor warnings are printed in the terminal when doing such a comparison