Installing From Source
Build Requirements
Difftastic is written in Rust, so you will need Rust installed. I recommend rustup to install Rust. Difftastic requires Rust version 1.66 or later.
You will also need a C++ compiler that supports C++14. If you're using GCC, you need at least version 8.
Build
You can download and build difftastic on crates.io with Cargo (which is part of Rust).
$ cargo install --locked difftastic
Difftastic uses the cc crate for building C/C++ dependencies. This
allows you to use environment variables CC and CXX to control the
compiler used (see the cc
docs).
See contributing for instructions on debug builds.
(Optional) Install a MIME Database
If a MIME database is available, difftastic will use it to detect
binary files more accurately. This is the same database used by the
file command, so you probably already have it.
The MIME database path is specified in the XDG specification. The database should be at one of the following paths:
/usr/share/mime/magic/usr/local/share/mime/magic$HOME/.local/share/mime/magic