Plurrrr

difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax. So for example, if you conditionalize some statement, the diff would only show the addition of one if with its condition instead of showing one line added (the if (condition)) and the line with the statement being removed and re-added (because of indentation changes). In many cases, such structural diffs transport the meaning of a change much better than the typical line-based diffs.

In this article, I want to demonstrate the power of parser-combinators in Rust, for a real use case that's not too simple and not too complex.

Nixpkgs provides a large number of packages that can be used in various ways. In some cases you want to make modifications to a package.

In this post we'll go through various ways how modified packages can be used in the Nix ecosystem, how packages can be modified and finally show some common use-cases:

• Use a different version of a package
• Use local source code for package
• Use a different dependency for a single package
• Apply a security patch system-wide