The following shows some ideas for improving GNU diff and patch.
The GNU project has identified some improvements as potential programming projects for volunteers. You can also help by reporting any bugs that you find. If you are a programmer and would like to contribute something to the GNU project, please consider volunteering for one of these projects. If you are seriously contemplating work, please write to 'gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu' to coordinate with other volunteers. For more informaton on reporting bugs to Cygnus, see Reporting problems in GETTING STARTED.
One should be able to use GNU diff to generate a patch from any pair of directory trees, and given the patch and a copy of one such tree, use patch to generate a faithful copy of the other. Unfortunately, some changes to directory trees cannot be expressed using current patch formats; also, patch does not handle some of the existing formats. These shortcomings motivate the following suggested projects.