Meld comments

[David Planella <david planella gmail com>]

Hi,

I have been using Meld on and off since a few of months, and apart from
saying thanks for such a great application, I'd like to write a few
comments/notes in an attempt to contribute to the enhancement (if
possible) of this awesome tool.

I am using Meld 1.1.2 on an Ubuntu Dapper system, and I've noticed the
following. Before reporting any of this as bugs or RFEs in bugzilla, I
thought I'd write to the list in order to check that what I'm saying is
sensible or at least worth being reported.

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"
close button (i.e. the "Close" cross is enclosed within a frame),
whereas on standard GNOME apps (e.g. Gedit or Epiphany) this frame only
appears when hovering the mouse cursor over the button. I think it would
make sense to have the same behaviour in all GNOME applications, i.e.
that the Meld tabs behave like the rest.

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
toolbar, in the same way there are buttons for navigating to the next or
previous diff already. I only realised Meld could handle merges after
quite some time of having used it exclusively for diff'ing (I used to
use kdiff3 or vim in diff mode for merging). To me it was simply not
obvious that the arrows in the middle could be used to apply the
changes. Furthermore, having buttons (e.g. "get diff", "put diff", "get
diff from both sides") would allow the use of shortcuts, which could
make the merge process easier and a lot quicker.

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?

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' on the terminal only prints out the standard
GTK/GNOME flags, and no specific usage information about Meld (i.e. I
was expecting to see at least 'meld directory' and 'meld file1 file2
[file3]' printed out as usage information). I am aware that one can use
'meld -h' for that and that there was an associated bug which has been
fixed in the latest versions, but I think it would also make sense to
support the long option (as in --help) in order to display usage
information.

5. GNOME session management does not seem to work in version 1.1.2.
Whenever I log out without closing meld and then I log back in, Meld
comes up but does not load the files which were open on the previous
session's diff. What it does is that it tries to open two files with the
following names: /home/dpm/--sm-client-id
and /home/dpm/117f000001000115044359700000054430005. Note that /home/dpm
is where the files from the previous diff session reside.

6. I find the Version Control backend in Meld amazing, and especially
because of the fact that it supports most of the popular VCS systems.
Being a CVS user and being on a Windows environment at work, I've come
to appreciate very much (and even depend of) a feature of the WinCvs
software, 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,
branches and tags of a file. There is something similar in emacs as well
that has (saving the differences) more or less the same functionality
(was it pcl-cvs?).

In any case, this is IMHO a very useful feature, so I wanted to ask if
it would be possible to have something like that included in Meld.

Many thanks in advance.

dpm

[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
files of MIME type text/* are selected in Nautilus. In this way, I can
select two or more text files, right-click on them and choose the
defined "diff with Meld" action from the context menu, which will simply
invoke meld with the two file names as arguments.