Comparing ".brd" files

Question

Is there a ULP which can find and show the differences between two layouts? Thank you.

rachaelp · Answer

Eagle Professional on Windows isn't a limitation to doing what has been suggested. You could use Windiff which will show you the changes in the XML board file but the down side is it's very low level and not in any graphical format which works fine but people some may not like viewing changes like this. You can install a Python interpreter for windows and then follow the instructions in Eagle Automation and hopefully get that working (I haven't tried but it should be possible). It'll be more work but if it does work then you'll have something that will give a graphical representation of where things have changed. Do you put your .brd file into a version control system like Git? If so then you could look at the differences in there too at a basic textual level (as per diff as it will do this within the VCS) and the bonus with git is that if you were to get eagle automation working you could then see visible differences between different board versions stored in git. Other than that I don't have any other suggestions I'm afraid. You might want to think about putting it as a suggestion for a future version of Eagle in the eagle.suggest forum. Best Regards, Rachael -- Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca. Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.