Meld directory compare broken in Ubuntu 18.04

[Carolyn Scheppner]

Meld fails to see file differences in a directory compare under Ubuntu 18.04. I was comparing compat-wireless-2014-03-31/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath5k/ and compat-wireless-2017-11-01/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath5k/ and Meld said there were no differences. I tried from the GUI, and I tried from the command line with both relative and full paths. In all cases Meld found no differences in the directories. If I substitute diff for meld in the command line, differences are found in the files in those directories.

Co-workers who use Fedora do not have this meld problem. For them, meld reports differences between files in those same two directories.

Note - in the Ubuntu Software Manager comments for Meld, someone else has the same issue of directory compares falsely reporting no difference under Ubuntu 18.04 (Roger's comment says "Does not work. Ubuntu 18.04. Check carefully. Says directories are same, even when they contain different numbers of files.")

I am using Ubuntu 18.04 and Meld 3.18.0-6 from ubuntu-bionic-universe. Two co-workers for whom meld directory compare is working are using #1 Fedora 25 w/ meld 3.16.3, and #2 Fedora 28 w/ meld 3.18.0. I am the only person in the office using Ubuntu.

[Carolyn Scheppner (cscheppner)]

Also reported on gitlab here:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/issues/242

[Carolyn Scheppner (cscheppner)]

New info...

When I clicked the "+New" button, Meld took away the yellow "Folders have no differences." headers and instead actually highlighted (by blue color) the names of the files with differences. I do not remember ever using that "+New" button before.

So it seems like New may have been involved, and now meld is working properly.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Upstream report closed 2018-11-29, no action taken.
Further to comment #2 by reporter, closing.