Re: Meld Idea

[Stephen Kennedy <stevek gnome org>]

[quoting your entire message for the mailing list]

> I've been using Meld for a while now. It's an awesome tool, thanks!
> 
> I had a quick look through the "bug" list but could not find anything
> quite like this. I was going to add a new issue but thought I'd run the
> idea past you first to see what you thought ...
> 
> I find I'm increasingly using source control tools that are more
> changeset oriented such as darcs.
> 
> The killer feature that darcs has over svn (other than not screwing
> local copies of the repo quite as often ;-)) is that it allows me to
> step through changes and record each change as part of the overall diff.
> It even allows me to choose individual changes in a file, rather than
> the diff of the whole file. At the end of the process you get a diff,
> the changeset, that can be sent to the upstream repository.
> 
> Now, that's fine until two changes you make to a file happen to be right
> next to each other. When that happens, darcs doesn't let you split the
> diff into parts - the only choice you have is to accept or reject the
> the whole diff. I suspect it's just using diff in the background, so
> it's not really surprising this happens.
> 
> Meld to the rescue! :)
> 
> A changeset-mode Meld would be really very cool. Meld could "overlay"
> some sort of diff output over the directory tree it normally displays,
> let me "record" all or some of the differences and then save the
> recorded differences as a single diff again. 
> 
> I imagine a similar interface to what you have now but instead of saving
> individual files, Meld would simply save everything back to the single
> diff file.
> 
> To get around the problem of adjacent changes that diff sees as one
> change, Meld would need to allow the user to select individual lines of
> a diff block. Actually, Meld's windows are editors so I guess this could
> be done manually.
> 
> Perhaps Meld could even take the diff as stdin and save it to stdout so
> it could be used as a "pipeline" to something like darcs.
> 
> I /think/ this is quite a different mode to how Meld currently works and
> I have no idea how easy it would be to implement.
> 
> What are your thoughts on the above? Does it actually make any
> sense ;-)? Do you think it is feasible?
> 
> Incidentally, I (well, my business partner really) recently had a brief
> chat with Martin Pool (http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/) about something
> like this as a way to record changesets for bazaar-ng and he was very
> interested in the idea.
> 
> Thanks for listening :).
> 
> Cheers, Matt

Hi Matt, thanks for the suggestion.

I think some form of changeset management will be essential for meld.
For instance, I often want to cherry pick changes from my working copy
and build a commit comment as I go. Your example of patch generation is
also a good one.

I think your intra-file differences could be specified by using three
panes - the repo copy, the working copy, the changeset copy (which is
initially the same as the working copy)

Stephen.
-- 
Stephen Kennedy <stevek gnome org>
http://meld.sf.net visual diff and merge