---
layout: post
title: diffoscope 136 released
author: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>
---

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version `136`. This version includes the following changes:

```
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Improvements:
  - Support external build tools. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#87)
  - Fallback to the regular .zip container format for .apk files if apktool
    is not available.
  - Clarify that "install X" in difference comment messages actually refer to
    a system/distribution package.
  - Drop the --max-report-size-child and --max-diff-block-lines-parent
    options; both deprecated and scheduled for removal in January 2018.

* Bug fixes:
  - No longer raise a KeyError exception if we request an invalid member from
    a directory container.

* Logging improvements:
  - Log a debug-level message if we cannot open a file as container due to a
    missing tool in order to assist diagnosing issues.
  - If we don't know the HTML output name, don't emit an enigmatic "html
    output for" message.
  - Add the current PATH environment variable to the "Normalising locale..."
    debug-level message.
  - Print the "Starting diffoscope $VERSION" line as the first line.
  - Correct a debug-level message for compare_meta calls to quote the
    arguments correctly.

* Refactoring:
  - Add support for alternative container types for a file, allowing for
    runtime (vs import time) control of fallbacks such as adding comments.
    and append a comment to a difference if we fallback to an inferior
    container format due to missing a tool.
  - Factor-out the generation of "foo not available in path" difference
    comment messages as a helper method in the exception that represents
    them.

* Code improvements:
  - Tidy diffoscope.main's configure method, factoring out the set of the
    Config() global out of the run_diffoscope method and inlining the
    functionality of maybe_set_limit, etc.
  - Rename diffoscope.locale module to diffoscope.environ as we are modifying
    things beyond just the locale (eg. calling tzset(), etc.)
  - Drop unused "Difference" import from the APK comparator.
  - Drop an assertion that is guaranteed by parallel "if" conditional.
  - Add a "noqa" line to avoid a false-positive flake8 "unused import"
    warning.
  - Turn down the "volume" for a recommendation in a comment.

* Release/source-code management:
  - Add a .git-blame-ignore-revs file to improve the output of git-blame(1) by
    ignoring large changes when introducing the Black source code reformatter
    and update the CONTRIBUTING.md guide on how to optionally use it locally.
  - Convert CONTRIBUTING.rst to CONTRIBUTING.md and include it in the
    PyPI.org release.

* Test improvements
  - Refresh and update the fixtures for the .ico tests to match the latest
    version of Imagemagick in Debian unstable.

[ Holger Levsen ]
* Bump Standards Version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.

[ Marc Herbert ]
* Search for expected keywords in the output of cbfstool tests and not a
  specific output. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!42)
```

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