Re: On ubuntu 8.04 it doesn't work well



2008/12/30 Bartolomeo Nicolotti <bnicolotti siapcn it>:
> I used meld on 7.10 for an year and it was great. Now I've upgraded to
> 8.04 and the default version on it, i.e. 1.1.5.1, doesn't work well:
>
> 1) when I scroll the two files panels loose alignement

Could you be more specific? Does one bar scroll without the other
scrolling, or what?

> 2) when comparing the two files attached by doing select-all, cut and
> paste on a new meld window on the 7.10 it took 30seconds, with 8.04 more
> than 5min and it seem to be in an endless loop.

In my experience, Meld's biggest speed problem comes from trying to
highlight differences between lines on 'modified' (blue) chunks. The
files you attached had one several thousand line long 'modified' chunk
that Meld was choking trying to highlight.

In order to do the highlighting, Meld concatenates the lines in a
modified chunk into one huge string and then asks for a diff on that
sequence. For short sequences this usually produces excellent results.
However, for long sequences it often produces poor results with lines
1 and 2 of the left-hand file matching up with sequences several
hundred lines away on the right-hand side. Moreover, it's *slow*.

I've spent a little bit of time trying to come up with a better way of
handling this, but it's just a *really hard* problem. One option is to
simply shrug and give up if the modified sequences are too long, on
the basis that it will take us forever to find similarities, and even
when we find them they probably won't be that good.

I've attached a patch that does this (applies to head, not sure about
1.2.1). It's not a solution, but I think that Meld probably needs to
have limit of this kind in place for worst-case situations like your
files.

Hope that helps.

--
Kai

Attachment: Give-up-on-long-inlines.patch
Description: Binary data



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