Re: Subversion merge conflicts (part 2)

Gleason, Todd wrote:
> I see that the main question on the “SVN Merge Conflicts Issue” thread
> is resolved, but I have a related question about conflict detection.
> For me, it's not an EOL issue but a tabs vs. spaces one.
>
>
>
> Looking at http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.4_releasenotes.html I see:
>
>
>
> svn diff -x [-u | -b | -w | --ignore-eol-style]
>
>
>
> You can make the internal svn diff ignore whitespace, according to this.
> Does this apply in terms of conflict detection? If so, how do you
> configure Tortoise and/or the command line client to ignore whitespace
> in a diff? Note that users might want to swap between clients and would
> expect no problems.

You can only ignore whitespaces in a diff. But you can't ignore them
when updating or merging. After all, you want your working copy to
reflect the state of your repository, otherwise you couldn't commit.
You should set the svn:eol-style property on your files to avoid such
problems.

> And whose whitespace is used when you ignore whitespace? Is it a
> combination of “mine” and “theirs”?

The whitespaces of 'theirs', but from 'mine' if 'mine' has lines which
'theirs' doesn't.

> Or do you need to mandate tabs or spaces for everything to work smoothly?

Of course: how should Subversion/TSVN know that you don't care about
whether a space is there or a tab? There are programming languages where
that makes a *big* difference. So Subversion *has* to treat those
differences as real differences and can't just ignore those.
It *can* ignore those for *showing* you a diff, but that's all.

Stefan

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