Binary diff/merge proposal

[Gordon Tyler]

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On 10/13/2010 4:08 PM, jbowtie at amathaine.com wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 1:20 AM, Gordon Tyler <gordon at doxxx.net> wrote:
>>
>> Why does it matter whether a merge tool supplies a GUI?
>>
> 
> For text merges, it doesn't really matter - you can just open up the
> file and resolve conflicts manually. For binary formats however
> (especially those that touch very complex formats) it may be the only
> way to actually do conflict resolution. Without this the goal of
> becoming useful for artists fails.

Sorry, I misread the earlier part about a single tool being able to
provide both a text merge and GUI merge.

It seems simpler to just have the user provide different names when
registering the tool to distinguish between text-mode and GUI-mode, e.g.
"GIMP (text)" and "GIMP (gui)". Hardcoding this distinction into the
tool framework with an explicit GUI flag doesn't handle the case where
there might be more than one text mode or more than one GUI mode.

Currently my mergetools module in bzr derives the tool name from the
executable but that can be changed. Although, anything more complicated
than the list of command-lines it currently stores is going to require
some trickery with the bzr config API since embedded sections are not
allowed.

Ciao,
Gordon

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