Deliverable: odf-diff?

[Sander Marechal <sander.marechal@tribal-im.com>]

Last Wednesday, a bunch of ODF toolkit developers met in Hamburg to 
share our work and vision on various aspects of development for ODF 
toolkits. Present were people from POD, ODF-DOM, ODFPy, AODL, OODoc, 
ODF-XSLT (myself), people from Sun (OOo, the ODF TC and UNO) and more.

At one point we were also discussing various interop issues and possible 
testing tools. One of the things that came out of there is that we'd 
really like a tool that can compare/diff two ODF documents. Unzipping 
the ODF file and using an XML diff tool is insufficient. For example: I 
could change the name of a style on a paragraph and also change that 
name in the styles.xml and functionally, the two documents should still 
be the same even though an XML diff tool says they're different. You 
could probably reorganise large parts of the styles.xml and still have 
the same document.

You could even do basic application testing with such a tool. Load an 
ODF in some application. Save it. Compare the original with the saved 
version. They should be functionally identical.

Could such a tool be put on the list of deliverables? Or is such a thing 
way too specific to put in there?

-- 
Sander Marechal