generate GNU diffs

[darkdragon-001]

Since you made all the effort of decoding the stream, what about another output format: GNU diff

This would allow to extract patch files from btrfs snapshots :)

[jkuchar]

What is your use case?

[darkdragon-001]

Compatibility with non-btrfs systems.
For example I have local snapshots on my laptop and want to backup only the changes to any cloud storage. So the first backup is full via rsync, the following ones could be a diff file, compressed and encrypted.
Or I want to calculate the difference from yesterday to a snapshot two weeks ago and apply this patch for a git repository somewhere.
Using a standard format gives you just so many possibilities 😄

[jkuchar]

Interesting idea, however GNU diffs are only for text files not for binary ones.

[darkdragon-001]

One could use the Git diff format. For text it is similar to GNU diff, but it also support binary.