meld for win32

[matthew arnison <maffew cat org au>]

Hi,

I love meld but I miss it when coding on win32.

From using meld, I couldn't see anything obvious that depended on gnome
as opposed to just gtk.

Having a look at the code for 0.9.4.1 I see that you use gconf for 
storing prefs and your gnomeglade.py uses a little bit of gnome (urlshow 
and FileEntry) but doesn't seem to have any complicated dependencies.

Of course the meld path handling and cvs command handling would need 
adjusting to work on win32.

It seems at least feasible to add switches to replace some of these
things with more general alternatives that would work on win32
(where gnome is not available). It also implies a bit of a testing and 
maintenance overhead.

Then I found your cvs repository on the GNOME server(a link from the 
meld homepage to cvs and the mailing list would be helpful by the way).

Even though you haven't released in a year, you've certainly been busy. 
So maybe there are a lot more GNOME dependencies than I thought.

Anyway, I think meld for win32 would be a bit of fiddling. I don't know 
if I would ever actually do it. But assuming I did, would you be 
interested at all in incorporating a patch for win32 compatibility?

Maybe you plan on using more of GNOME anyway. I'm not sure what GNOME's 
philosophy is with regard to win32. It could be that GNOME is all the 
GUI layer stuff that Unix needs but which doesn't need to be portable. 
The portable stuff goes in GTK. Or it could be that GNOME hackers 
explicitly prefer not to make their code portable to win32.

On the other hand meld would fill a nice gap on win32. Tortoise CVS is 
free and does a good job of integrating with the Windows Explorer. But 
meld is much slicker, plus it provides a great diff and edit interface 
which Tortoise doesn't provide at all.

I also did a hunt of python bindings for SVN, and I found this:

http://pysvn.tigris.org/

You may be aware of it. They have a Linux / win32 GUI on top of it, but 
I think meld is a lot further along. Perhaps if meld could be got 
roughly working on win32, then some collaboration might be possible.

Cheers,
Matthew.