Opening new tabs in existing instance

[Magnus Ihse Bursie <magnus ihse bursie oracle com>]

One thing I miss much in meld is the ability to open new tabs in an 
existing instance. Some example use cases:

* When working with Perforce (p4) source control, diffing a changelist 
results in a call to the diff tool for each file included. This gives me 
a multitude of meld windows, instead of a single window with many tabs. 
The latter behaviour was possible on Araxis Merge, which I used before, 
and was very satisfied with.

* I typically use geany as a text editor. When I want to edit a new file 
from the command line, I just type "geany myfile.c" and it gets opened 
in a new tab, and the spawning geany process immediatly terminates and 
returns me to the command line. The closest thing I can get in meld is 
by using "meld myfile1.c myfile2.c &", but that still leaves some debug 
output on my terminal. Also, if I kill the shell the meld windows gets lost.

When I started investigating this, I found out that a patch to fix this 
has already been written, but never been included. See 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453670. It's a bit old, and 
I'm not sure if it works in a current meld.

It seems that meld development activity has gone up somewhat lately. 
What are the chances that such a patch would get included? If the 
chances are high enough, I'm more than willing to fix the patch so it 
works on the current source base.

/Magnus