---
layout: post
title: diffoscope 43 released
author: Jérémy Bobbio <lunar@debian.org>
---

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version `43`. This version includes the following changes:

```
[ Reiner Herrmann ]
* Add comparator for Android dex files.
* Add comparator for filesystem images using libguestfs.

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add comparator for icons and JPEG images using libcaca.

[ Clemens Lang ]
* Add comparator for OS X binary files (also known as Mach-O). Requires the
  otool(1) and lipo(1) which are mostly likely found on OS X.

[ Baptiste Daroussin ]
* Use libarchive for tar instead of Python included library. We already
  have libarchive as a mandatory dependency, and libarchive is faster
  and more reliable.

[ Mike McQuaid ]
* Support older versions of GNU diff. OS X 10.11 ships with an older GPLv2
  version (`2.8.1`) which does not support the `diff -u7` flag but instead
  wants to use `diff -U7` which appears to be forward compatible.

[ Ed Maste ]
* Use more portable LC_CTYPE suggestion. The C.UTF-8 locale is a Debian
  thing.

[ Levente Polyak ]
* Force ppudump to output time in UTC using the TZ variable. Support for the
  TZ environment variable has been implemented in fpc r32369.
* Make PPU comparator version aware by checking the magic version expected by
  ppudump itself.

[ Joachim Breitner ]
* Add support for multi-file HTML output with on-demand loading of long
  diffs. This is available through the --html-dir option. Location of the
  jQuery JavaScript library can be specified through the --jquery option.
  (Closes: #806891)

[ Jérémy Bobbio ]
* Return the target path as string when extracting from a Zip. Regression
  introduced in diffoscope 41. (Closes: #805774)
* Use pass_fds from Popen instead of reimplementing it. Thanks Baptiste
  Daroussin for the tip.
* Fix typo in debug message. Thanks Clemens Lang!
* Benefit from dictionary keys() behaving as set when comparing md5sums.
* Prevent overwriting the destination when extracting with libarchive.
  Thanks Baptiste Daroussin noticing and initial implementation.
* Fix PPU detection and associated tests.
* Use lazy extraction instead of explicit bracketing. We now rely on
  Python garbage collector to delete file once we are done comparing.
  This will make parallel processing easier to implement.
* Make container class available on demand instead of bracketing.
  This cleanups boilerplate code, and should make parallel processing
  easier to implement.
* Always compare container content if applicable. This removes more
  boilerplate code.
* Call xxd like other commands.
* Analyze md5sums file in .deb before working on data.tar. This makes
  the code more robust and is required to properly skip files listed as
  identical in md5sums while doing parallel processing.
* Add support for package names for OS other than Debian. The --list-tools
  command-line option now supports an optional argument to display a given
  operating system. When --list-tools is called without
  an optional argument and the current operating system is unknown,
  the list of packages for all known operating systems will be displayed.
  Initial implementation by Mattia Rizzolo, then greatly enhanced by
  Levente Polyak.
* Update list of contributors.
* Add contact info to README.
* Add python3-guestfs to the list of Recommends.
* Display a better error message when guestfs can't be started.
* Set libguestfs memory allocation to 128 MiB in autopkgtest as more is
  likely to fail with adt-virt-qemu default settings.
* Prevent CBFS comparator from scanning big files needlessly. Thanks Mike
  Hommey for the detailed bug report and suggestions. (Closes: #807997)
```

You find out more by [visiting the project homepage](https://diffoscope.org).