Re: Meld comments

[David Planella <david planella gmail com>]

Hi Stephen,

Many thanks for your reply.

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 22:35 +0100, Stephen Kennedy wrote:
> [..]. 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!

I'm sorry to hear this. Actually Meld already does what I want too, but
seeing the possibilities of the VCS backend, I simply cannot help
thinking of new features/enhancements. 

As a maybe unrelated side note, I've found that (apart from the graph
feature) I can replace gcvs (the WinCvs Linux version, a nearly dead
project) with the Meld cvs backend. 

In any case, if you decide to start a new project, good luck. If it is
just half as good as Meld, it will already be a big asset to the FLOSS
community.

> 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.

I also think it is a good solution to make Meld follow the
pseudo-standard until there is a proper GNOME tab standard (which I fear
won't be any time soon).

> 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.

Yes, sorry, we users simply request new functionality without thinking
that something is simply not implemented for lack of human resources or
because of the technical difficulties of the actual implementation. I'm
not familiar with TextView/TextBuffer at all, but I've meaning to have a
look at it for some other reasons since some time...

> 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.

Although it would mean that Meld would be able to do something that no
other diff tool I know can do.

> 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.

So Meld will not have session management?

> 
> 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?

It is not a patch. It is simply a so called "config file" for the
nautilus-actions application. What it effectively does is to add a "Diff
with Meld" context menu entry whenever more than one plain text files
are selected in Nautilus. It is not actually integrated with Meld, but,
I find it more elegant than writing a Nautilus script. I submitted this
config file to the nautilus-actions "user actions" page, there:

http://www.grumz.net/?q=archive/2006/6/23

The project itself and the program seems quite neat and nicely
implemented. It is not yet part of the GNOME project, but they seem to
have already applied for it.

Cheers.