Framework for external diff/merge tools

[Martin Pool]

There are plugins to run some specific diff/merge tools such as vimdiff and Kompare from bzr. Much of the code is common. We should make a standard framework into which commands can be registered.

Some tools will have different capabilities -- for example vimdiff can as far as I know only merge one file per invocation.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

There is a plugin which now provides this. Called 'difftools'. There is also a similar one 'extmerge' which does merging using 3rd party tools.

Do we need to keep a bug tracker open for this?

[teki (teki321)]

> There is a plugin which now provides this. Called 'difftools'. There is also a similar one 'extmerge' which does merging using 3rd party tools.

"extmerge" exists only in the plugin list, it's not possible to download it.
"difftools" doesn't help too much in merging.

> Do we need to keep a bug tracker open for this?

I think yes. It's much easier to merge booth in Mercurial and in darcs.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I agree, there should be a built in capability to use external merge tools. difftools at least looks fairly reasonable to merge in.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Martin Pool wrote:
> I agree, there should be a built in capability to use external merge
> tools. difftools at least looks fairly reasonable to merge in.

I don't think it's a very good idea to use visual merge tools in-process
as part of the merge. I like the approach extmerge takes better.

But it isn't hard to write a Merger subclass that uses an external tool.
 See merge.Diff3Merger for an example.

Aaron
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFqx340F+nu1YWqI0RApuLAJ49fu02hWZ7WYPCOCkI6RW2rRDd0ACdHnXK
OoV7FKBgvLGd9vrKfSrVta0=
=bw3u
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[teki (teki321)]

I am sold.

Extmerge should be included in the release, it's really handy.

(It was just hard to get it, I weren't able to branch it through our corporate firewall/proxy.)