Re: "Could not start external merge program"

Ghost wrote:
> On Oct 25, 8:16 am, Stefan Küng <tortoise..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ghost wrote:
>>> I'm getting this error whenever I try to use TortoiseSVN's "edit
>>> conflicts" tool:
>>> Could not start external merge program!
>>> --------
>>> The directory name is invalid.
>>> Similarly, I get the same error only with "diff" instead of "merge"
>>> when trying to compare revisions. For that, I even tried installing
>>> WinMerge and set up TortoiseSVN to use that external program, and I
>>> get the same error.
>> This should not happen if you've set up the external diff/merge tools
>> correctly. Does this also happen if you set the options to use
>> TortoiseMerge instead of a custom diff/merge tool?
>
> Yes, originally I had just installed TortoiseSVN and no external diff/
> merge tools. In the past (on Windows XP) that worked fine for me.
> But now on Vista, TortoiseSVN doesn't seem able to call TortoiseMerge,
> or the external program either -- I've triple-checked the path to the
> WinMerge executable and it's valid. I used the Browse... button to
> get to it in the TortoiseSVN options dialog.

I can not reproduce this. I first thought that it might have something
to do with you using Vista x64, but even if I try it on my Visty x64
partition, it works as expected.
So there must be something messed up on your system/installation which
causes this.

The error "the directory name is invalid" is thrown by the
CreateProcess() API if the 'current working directory' parameter points
to something bogus. But that could only happen if for some unknown
reason, the GetCurrentDirectory() API would return that bogus data, and
I can't see how that could happen.

Stefan

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