Suggested Projects for Improving GNU diff and patch

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.

• Internationalization: Handling multibyte and varying-width characters.
• Changing Structure: Handling changes to the directory structure.
• Special Files: Handling symbolic links, device special files, etc.
• Unusual File Names: Handling file names that contain unusual characters.
• Time Stamp Order: Outputting diffs in time stamp order.
• Ignoring Changes: Ignoring certain changes while showing others.
• Speedups: Improving performance.