RE: Re: Feature request: Align manually feature for both diff and merge

I've decided to try and avoid the personal barbs, it's just way out of line/context.

Getting conflicts is a common occurrence in many types of projects/scenarios.

For example, in a scripted environment, where the scripting language does not allow for easily hiding multi-platform dependencies, and you have multiple teams working on the different platforms, all under tight schedules, then you will often encounter people hitting the same section of code, causing conflicts.

This is neither poor communication, nor poor scheduling, and in reality, the conflict isn't or shouldn't be that hard to resolve. The issue of difficulty is however based on the tools as illustrated by some of the examples.

Another scenario is when refactoring a large code base. Again, some collisions may occur as different people refactor different systems that are closely related at a higher level. Again, this does not reflect serious communication problems.

"
That means you have serious problems with communication in your team.
"

You are really showing your intent for personal attacks at the expense of your credibility.

Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Stefan Küng [mailto:tortoisesvn@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 11:37 AM
To: users@tortoisesvn.tigris.org
Subject: Re: Feature request: Align manually feature for both diff and merge

Peter Yamamoto wrote:
> If you have not had the pleasure of a manual align, I highly suggest
> you download beyond compare and try it.
>
> A typical use case for coders is when somebody moves code (and
> possibly modifies it as well).
>
> When doing the diff, most diffs just show this as a new block. (when
> two users do similar stuff, then you really need to be able to align
> the two blocks to diff them).

 From my point of view, if two users do similar stuff you have bigger problems than diffing those files. That means you have serious problems with communication in your team.

> Manual align simply means to start (re)diffing the two files from this
> point on (where you aligned them).
>
> So if somebody moved the block of code at line 35000, to line 560, for
> example, I could manually align 3500 with 560 and be able to easily
> see if the block of code was modified or not (as well as have all
> left/right diff/editing features available).
>
> Without this feature, it is very difficult/time consuming/error prone
> to evaluate such diffs.
>
> That's one very typical, very useful, use case example.
>
> Another one is checking/verifying/diffing copy and paste blocks.
> Since you can align the original with the new paste, you can more
> easily verify that anything that should have been changed in the
> pasted version (for example) was changed from the original.
>
> Another one is when using a code section as a template in another
> place. Even though the files are very different, you can align the
> place of interest to where you want to add the similar code and use
> the original to see what has changed etc.
>
> My work may be chaotic, but it would also be much more error-prone w/o
> this feature!-) Basically I don't see how any coder lives without it.
> Doing this "manually" is just error-prone (but in my experience,
> people who don't know of this feature/functionality simply are
> ignorant to the process/workflow of actually checking these types of
> diffs and pay for it with bugs).

I think that such a feature is way out of TMerge's league. We should keep TMerge simple - for such complicated features you can use commercial tools.

Stefan

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