"Alexander Klenin" <klenin@gmail.com> wrote on 10.10.2007 04:24:22:
> I started a long reply to Stefan^2 yesterday, but was unable to send it
> due to electricity blackout (sadly, this is still common in Russia).
Myself being raised on the "darker side of the Iron Curtain",
I deeply sympathize with you ;)
> On 10/9/07, Stefan.Fuhrmann@etas.de <Stefan.Fuhrmann@etas.de> wrote:
> > My question: Is this still true or do we plan to make TortoiseMerge
> > a full-blown bells-and-whistles merge tool?
> Why not? It is certainly not a weak one already, and it is fun to work
in it.
I'm not against it and "fun" is, in itself, a sufficient reason
to do it (at least in my book).
Maybe we are at the point where most essential features have been
implemented into SVN /TSVN. It seems to me that this is the right
point to start "attacking" and finally "beating" other CM systems
in terms of
* performance (total time to get things done),
* simplicity (becomes an important factor as feature count goes
up)
* look / user experience (e.g. "merge tool" is a plus for
ClearCase)
In other words: great, smoothly integrated tools.
> > > * BeyondCompare for diffs
> > > - great folder tree scanning, filtering, comparison, sync.
> > > (not used by TSVN but the reason I have that tool at all)
> >
> > TSVN doesn't need that. And there's no way to start a diff tool with
> > folders as parameters.
> I disagree here.
> TMerge can be easily started this way -- just select two folders in
explorer,
> and choose 'SVN Diff' from context menu.
> It even errors out with 'TortoiseMerge can't diff directories.'
> So I would say it is a missing feature, but not an important one, for
> me at least.
Correctly. Also, one might imagine TortoiseMerge to be used for
interactive "svn merge" of whole folders. If we should get that
to work smoothly, users may become less afraid of that "merge"
problem they did not have in SourceSafe.
> > > * Araxis Merge for merges
> > > - great auto-merge (many conflicts are just resolved "the right
way")
> Interesting. Have you any idea about the algorithms involved?
No, that is just an observation (Araxis Merge is a commercial tool):
Click on the "merge" button and most conflicts are gone. Perhaps,
svn is more conservative about what it considers a conflict while
Araxis Merge may know about source code in an abstract way and
will let the user (compiler) find the 0.x percent that go wrong.
For TortoiseMerge that means we could device specific merge strategies
for certain file types and / or different "aggression" levels.
> > I wouldn't mind to have TSVN allow the user to choose between two (or
> > maybe three, but not more) diff/merge tools from the context menu.
> I agree that this is desirable.
>
> > But configuring is up to the user. Because if we try to do that
> > automatically, we invite big trouble:
> > * users complaining about us missing their favorite tool
> > * different versions of the tools using different params
> > * tools configured wrong which makes them not show everything without
> > the user knowing
>
> How about contrib\ext_diff_examples.txt file, documenting the commands
> to invoke various external tools, with a clear text stating those are
> just examples and require modification according to user's local
configuration?
>
> This way the only users affected will be those ones who actually do read
> documentation and make an effort to manually copy-and-paste examples.
> Hopefully, we will thus avoid the silliest complaints.
That is an excellent proposal. If we could add an "examples for
common tools" link to that file in current tool tip bubble, my
problem would be perfectly solved. Maybe there should also be a
note about that link in the manual.
-- Stefan^2.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@tortoisesvn.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@tortoisesvn.tigris.org
Received on Tue Oct 16 15:39:26 2007