Re: Merging Binary files

On Thursday 12 July 2007 12:40, claudia logan wrote:
> Thanks Ryan et al,
>
> But is there a way to just force binary merge since I know this is what I
want, or "turn off" the diff for them. This process should be completed with
minimal effort and short amount of time. It seems is almost easier to
just "copy-n-paste" from trunk to branch and finish sooner.
>
> Again, thanks for the advice, I will now try it.
>
> C.

It's just not possible because SubVersion doesn't know anything about the
binary file formats and would most propably corrupt the file if it would try
to "merge" them.

SubVersion can merge text files because it knows about the format: it knows
that text files consist of records, and each record is separated by some kind
of line separator (which is different on UNIX, Windows and MacOS but well
known). So SubVersion can look at each record (line) and if no changes in the
same record happened SubVersion can merge them. But if the same line was
changed in both sides of the revisions to merge then SubVersion simply can't
guess what to do and will report a conflict which it can't merge.

For binary files no record separator is known (sometimes there just isn't
any), it differs from format to format. So you would need a program that
understand the format in question and would understand how to merge two
versions. And there's really just no way SubVersion could ever merge binary
files except maybe through the help of such external merge tools.

Hope that helps you understand the issue :-)
Bye,
        Marc

-- 
Marc Haisenko
Comdasys AG
Rüdesheimer Straße 7
D-80686 München
Tel:   +49 (0)89 - 548 433 321
e-mail: haisenko@comdasys.com
http://www.comdasys.com
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