Re: Meld comments

["Stephen Kennedy" <stevek gnome org>]

Hi David,

thanks for taking the time to write these out. I always find such
lists interesting. As time goes on I've found that meld mostly does
what I want so I'm quite disinclined to do any major new coding. In
fact it's nearly time to start a new project!


> 1. The tabs in Meld (e.g. when there are more than one diff pages) are
> not the same as the standard GNOME ones. The Meld tabs have a "buttoned"...

There are no "standard" tab close buttons. AFAIK there was a proposal,
but it was never implemented so each app just rolls their own. In any
case, I suppose gedit+epiphany are pseudo standards so I've changed
meld to look like them.

> 2. IIRC there is already a RFE in bugzilla for this, so I'll just
> probably leave a comment there, but I just wanted to write a short note
> about it here. I think there should be "merge" buttons on the diff ...

Yes, this has been on my list for quite a while. At the moment I've
not found a good way to show what the "current" difference is.
Code-wise that is - drawing on top of textview is awkward. See the
commented out lines in on_textview_expose_event.

> 3. I read about the possibility of using Meld as a cvs conflict solver
> on this list. I think that would be another great feature to have. What
> is the current status of that?

Probably not going to happen because for me it's too little work for
too little gain. All (?) new VC systems have a diff3 hook. It's
probably easier to add the hook to cvs or cvsnt.

> 4. I was looking at how to launch Meld from within Nautilus[1] and I
> started looking at the command-line options and how to invoke meld.  Typing 'meld --help'

Yes, both -h and --help work again since 1.1.3 (not sure when they were broken)

> 5. GNOME session management does not seem to work in version 1.1.2.

Doh. Meld doesn't do session management. I had a hack which ignored
these params, but that's a new one. The next version will ignore that
one too.

> 6. ... which is the graphical representation of a files' revision
> history. What they do is to parse the output of 'cvs log' and output all
> information in a graphical manner, in which you can see all versions, ...

I've used this feature of wincvs too. And I know it could be done
much, much better. However, I always end up using viewcvs instead
mainly because of the query interface.

In the end I think the cost/benefit does not justify the work. But if
someone would like to have a go, even as a standalone app, I can merge
it into meld.

> [1] A workaround for this is to use the nautilus-actions application.
> With that, one can define actions that will be added to the nautilus
> context menu whenever a specified condition is met. On my system, I've
> defined such an action for meld, which will trigger whenever two or more...

Brilliant. Last time I looked at nautilus integration you could barely
tell it to open a folder with meld. Can you open a bug and attach  the
patch?

Stephen.