Re: "all changes left-to-right" functionality

[Kai <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 31 January 2011 00:32, Nicolas JEAN <lemondedejici free fr> wrote:
>
> On 30/01/2011 02:53, Kai wrote:
>> On 22 January 2011 05:55, Nicolas JEAN <lemondedejici free fr> wrote:
>>> Hi dear meld people,
>>>
>>> I used meld today, again and with pleasure, and noticed that a
>>> functionality is "missing" (well I was missing it).
>>> Indeed, when comparing two folders (contrary to comparing two files), I
>>> did not find an option to pass all differences from left to right, or
>>> vice-versa. (In a two-folder comparison and in my opinion, that would be
>>> copying all differing files from one side to the other.)
>> I'm not sure what you mean here. You can already copy whole folders
>> from one side to another. Do you mean that you want to copy *only*
>> files that exist in both folders and are different? In what situations
>> do you want to do this?
>
> Yes, I think you get my idea. My goal is indeed to synchronise two
> folders; for the sake of clarity, here is what should be done (from left
> to right):
> 1. if two files exist, but are different, then right file is replaced
> with left file (assumed to be newer);
> 2. if two files exist and are the same, don't do anything (or maybe ask
> the user if files should be overwritten);
> 3. if right file exists but left file does not, delete right file;
> 4. if left file exists but right file does not, copy left file to the right;

If I read this correctly, this is exactly the same as copying one
directory over the other, except that timestamps, etc. on existing
identical files should be preserved.

> My case is that of the synchronisation between two svn folders, where it
> might be important that files in the right folder that haven't changed
> keep their timestamps, rather than be overwritten (thus case 2).

That sounds like a reasonable use case, but it's also a fairly niche
requirement.

> But I believe this very much depends on what the user wants to achieve;
> thus, this functionality may be nicer if the user is presented with a
> window where he chooses what to do in each of the 4 above cases (radio
> buttons or check boxes), before he/she runs the "merge"/synchronisation.
>
> Do you think it would be nice to have this in meld, or rather confusing,
> and thus leave this capacity to other synchronisation programs?

I think that by itself it would probably be too confusing to have in
Meld itself. Also, there is could be some odd behavioural interactions
with other features of Meld. e.g., do we consider files to be
identical if they're only identical post-filtering? is that yet
another option? what do we do about files filtered out at the
directory level? etc.

If Meld had a plug-in architecture, I'd say it should be a plugin...
but we don't have one yet.

cheers,
Kai