Hello Stefan & Simon,
Thank you both. This has been very helpful.
Thanks,
Eric
Stefan Küng wrote:
> Simon Large wrote:
>
>> 2009/5/18 Eric Stegemoller <estegemoller_at_idmcomp.com>:
>>
>>> Hello Simon,
>>>
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> Thanks for taking this up. I have copied this to the TortoiseSVN
>> developers mailing list so that others can participate in the
>> discussion. You can subscribe to the list by sending an email to
>> dev-subscribe_at_tortoisesvn.tigris.org. Or just ask responders to copy
>> to your email address.
>>
>>
>>> Sometime ago you had contacted IDM Computer Solutions about adding support
>>> to UltraCompare for providing view titles for temporary files when SVN
>>> invokes UltraCompare to perform a difference comparison. I have included the
>>> original message at the bottom of this message. We wish to include this and
>>> more into our next release of UltraCompare. Our goal is to offer full
>>> support for UltraCompare-SVN integration to our users. In order to do this
>>> we need to know more about the command line that SVN passes to UltraCompare.
>>> Perhaps the following questions will help us move in the right direction:
>>>
>> First off, I should say that this is specifically for TortoiseSVN
>> which is a Windows client for SVN, and probably the most popular
>> Windows client, but it's not the only one. Other SVN clients will have
>> different ways of integrating external diff tools.
>>
>>
>>> 1.) Do you have any switches that you pass and if so what is their meaning
>>> and purpose?
>>>
>> The interface to external tools is user-defined in TortoiseSVN. We
>> can't expect other tools to change to a fixed format, so we provide a
>> way to use as many switches as the external tool provides. The user
>> defines a command line that will be sent to the tool, which can
>> include any tool-specific switches. Certain parameters in that
>> definition like %base will be substituted at call time with real data.
>>
>>
>>> 2.) From your documentation I assume %base and %mine are the repository
>>> version of the file and local version of the file respectively. Are they
>>> passed in this order? Also, is there a convention to the order in which
>>> things are passed ie. filenames, switches etc?
>>>
>> %base is the original version as it existed in the repository before I
>> started editing. %mine is the local version as it is now after I have
>> made some changes. They are passed in the order the user specifies in
>> his command line definition. If you need them in a specific order then
>> we can add that to the examples in our docs.
>>
>>
>>> 3.) What syntactical conventions do you use for quotes, spaces etc.?
>>>
>> Good question. I think filenames end up being quoted, and I remember
>> seeing a post on this just a few days ago, but can I find it now?
>> Stefan - how does the quoting work and are there any tricky edge
>> cases?
>>
>
> The params passed to the diff/merge tools are enquoted, but double
> quotes are removed. So for example if the tool is configured like this:
> diff.exe "%base" "%mine"
> then TSVN first replaces this with
> diff.exe ""path\to\base"" ""path\to\mine""
> and then replaces all double quotes with single quotes, which leads to
> diff.exe "path\to\base "path\to\mine"
>
>
>>> 4.) For "View Title" names how do you specify what is the file path name and
>>> what is the "View Title" name? Do you use a special separator character?
>>> What are the conventions here? (I see you discussed this in the original
>>> message. Is this still the case?)
>>>
>> That's up to you. You implemented it in the last release using a
>> semicolon between the filename and view title and I explained why that
>> would not work (problems with quoting, and semicolon is also a legal
>> filename character). I suggest adding separate switches to introduce
>> the titles.
>>
>
> If possible, TSVN also passes the view titles with the params
> %bname, %yname, %tname, %mname
> but not all diffs/merges have those filled in. TortoiseMerge creates the
> view titles itself if those params are empty.
>
>
>>> 5.) Do you ever send more than two files for comparison at a time? If so how
>>> is this information passed?
>>>
>> There can be 4 files if you are viewing merge results, but
>> 1. The common ancestor (base)
>> 2. The file with my changes (mine)
>> 3. The file from the repository with changes I want to merge (theirs)
>> 4. The resultant merged file
>> But unless you already support merging in this way I suggest sticking
>> to the 2-way diff.
>>
>>
>>> 6.) I see that SVN creates a temp file locally to represent the file from
>>> the repository. Should we allow users to edit this or is it intended purely
>>> for the sake of comparison? (I assume it is).
>>>
>> It depends how you invoke the diff tool. If you compare 2 files in the
>> repository then you have 2 temp files. If you compare a file against
>> its BASE version then neither is a temp file. The BASE file in a
>> subversion working copy is read-only and must never be edited, but it
>> is useful to be able to edit the file in your working copy. I'm not
>> sure whether we set the temp files to be read-only, but we could do
>> so. In that case you could assume that if a file is writeable then it
>> is editable.
>>
>
> The temp files are set to readonly if they really are just temp files
> and don't represent 'real' files in a working copy.
>
>
>>> 7.) Some of our users have reported that other diff applications have
>>> options that when enabled will automatically configure SVN to use the
>>> application. If this is something that SVN supports what is the method for
>>> doing this. Is this something that is passed on the command line or does it
>>> require editing a configuration setting programmatically?
>>>
>> That's not something I have heard of, and we don't generally do
>> automatic changes - people don't like surprises ;-)
>>
>
> Those diff tools create/change the registry entries TSVN uses to
> configure those tools.
> But if you do that, please don't do this without asking the user first!
>
>
>>> 8.) Are there any upcoming changes to SVN that will affect any of this?
>>>
>> I don't think so.
>>
>
> No, even if we change something, the 'old' way will still work. We try
> to stay compatible as much as possible.
>
>
> Stefan
>
>
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Received on 2009-05-20 21:20:19 CEST