Major diff/merge changes in bzr and explorer

[David Ingamells]

On 29/04/12 09:43, Andreas Sommer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> since Canonical didn't participate in GSoC, I couldn't implement the
> idea I described below. Also I was not accepted for GSoC because I'm
> writing my master's thesis, and organizations expect full-time
> commitments (applied for Debian and Monkey). So much about that... Still
> I'd like to do some work on diff/merge tool definitions because for me
> this is a feature that I am totally missing, so I would like to have
> your opinion and feedback about the idea I already presented some weeks
> ago - it is outlined below. Are you okay with the changes I'm proposing,
> do you see problems, do you think I shouldn't mess around with your code
> :P ? Any links on Bazaar development (like a source code overview or so)
> will also be helpful.
>
> Best regards
>   Andreas
>
Dear Andreas,
A plea if you are looking at how bzr handles diff tools:
When an interactive diff tool like meld is used and you run a diff on a 
branch where files have been added or removed then bzr just dumps the 
content of the added or removed file to the terminal instead of also 
showing the contents via the diff tool with an empty counterpart. This 
is very annoying as one has to switch between the terminal and the 
interactive diff tool to see the changes and the 'dumped' contents may 
be larger than the scroll buffer.

If bzr knowns about diff/merge tool definitions then it can also be told 
that a tool is interactive and in that case all changes should be shown 
through that tool.

So if it fits in your work I'd be very pleased if you could look at this 
issue too :-)
thanks,
David.